Translator: Juliet Vdt Reviewer: Denise RQ
(Music)
(Singing)
(Video) Narrator: Geoffroy and Loïc are brothers and explorers
who are passionate about water issues.
(Music)
They decided to travel along the East African rift
from Uganda to Israel
to meet nomadic and settled populations.
(Music)
In 5 months, from the sources of the Nile to the arid lands of the Near East,
they traveled over 13,000 km by sidecar,
with one question in mind:
in 2050, will there be enough water on Earth
to feed 9 billion people?
(Music) (Laughter)
Loïc: This handsome lad is Geoffroy.
Geoffroy: And, this is my brother, Loïc.
Loic: In fact, today's your name day.
It's Saint Geoffroy's day.
Happy name day, Geoffroy.
(Applause)
G: Thanks.
L: First, we have a question for you:
how many of you have running water?
I'd like to see a show of hands.
That's what I thought. Thanks.
We're here to answer one question:
is there enough water on Earth
to feed the 9 billion people
Earth will have in 2050?
Again. I'd like to see some participation.
Those who think we do, raise your hand.
You're the optimists.
Those who think we don't, raise your hand.
G: Quite a few are saying no!
L: Pessimists or maybe just realists.
Now, those who don't know, raise your hands.
L: Really?
G: Yes, I, for one, don't know.
But I'm sure about two things:
I know there will be 9 billion human beings in 2050.
It's not fatal.
I also know there is enough water on Earth
to feed 9 billion people,
and I know there is enough to feed 18 billion inhabitants
who will live like you do.
However, I do have one doubt:
will we be able to use this resource intelligently
to ensure in some way not only
that 9 billion people live with dignity in 2050 -
because the goal is not just to make it to 2050,
and that's it - it's in 2050 and onwards -
and that's a big uncertainty.
So, I've got two solutions.
And I've seen you, those who said no.
First, let's not make it up to 9 billion.
We have the military, scientific and medical means
to not go up to 9 billion.
It's not a joke, we can, we've got the choice, the freedom
to make it possible.
By the way, I'll be waiting at the door with a sterilizer
for those who said no. (Laughter)
We, we may have another solution.
It would be to invite you to look back into history
and try to learn lessons from the past.
L: Every year, we receive enough water
for 9 billion inhabitants,
as rain, as snow.
Clouds bring it to us.
It's an immutable cycle.
Every year, it's the same quantity coming
and coming back the next week.
Well, it's great to know that,
but it's also important,
because we've been - sorry.
Water comes back every year,
but in a very capricious way.
I mean, it never falls
at the right place, at the right time.
Every time I go on holidays, it's raining.
When I come back, go to the office,
the weather is great.
G: More seriously, it can rain a lot where there is nobody
and it can not rain at all where there is life,
where people are waiting for it.
L: We'll take you to a trip we did in a sidecar,
but, for you, we'll do it here, as a time travel.
We're going to go back in time and watch Earth
when life began.
G: So please, imagine heaven on Earth.
Jungle, maybe,
the primal forest, human-free.
This nature looks harmless, this way.
But as we've been in that jungle,
this human-free nature,
we realized there were strangler ficuses.
How strange for a "harmless" plant.
So yes, it's the law of the jungle,
a fight for life
whatever we have to stranger.
It's a fight for resources.
Some go further:
eucalyptus does not hesitate,
it poisons the ground,
what for?
To eradicate competitors
to make its species the only one on Earth,
even if it has to kill all the others.
Its goal is to hog the resource.
L: In this fight, this beautiful heaven,
Adam and Eve will arrive.
Adam and Eve, it's hunter-gatherer people.
They pick the apple the snake is giving.
They scrape Earth to eat roots.
And they hunt.
They live near water,
because they have no other way to draw water than their hands.
Then, they go hunting for 2 hours, they come back and think:
I was thirsty, I'd like something better, what can I do?
And we invent the bowl,
Adam and Eve, hunter-gatherer,
invent the bowl,
so they can carry water around
and bring water inside, in the house, the domus.
They domesticate the water.
G: After bringing the water home,
hunter-gatherer realized
it was tiring to bring it home.
And Adam and Eve are not alone anymore,
there is Cain, and Abel.
Cain and Abel do predation.
It means they empty things without caring what is left after them.
So they empty a place,
empty another,
and then, they wonder: well, why don't we follow that resource?
Migration appears.
Our friends, I mean, the family, Adam, Eve, organize, adapt,
they follow the resource, the rain.
They kind of do bio-imitation:
they watch the gnus following the resource.
So they do the same.
They create an organization.
L: Following the resource. Humans multiply.
Families grow.
Villages grow.
They move.
And moving all the time, they find places already occupied.
G: Not alone anymore.
L: They are not alone anymore.
The world population increases.
They made some basic observations,
making bariers around the tent
to keep wild life away,
they planted a branch
which had blossomed again,
gave fruits again.
They realized some wild animals were getting used to them.
That way they create agriculture.
They started to domesticate plants and animals.
They started to take ownership of that resource.
Then settlement was born,
humans settled
to protect and keep, but mostly enjoy
what they achieved,
using the land, the animals.
G: To pass on the knowledge, they needed an organization.
To pass on the knowledge, they created language.
Language allows them to speak with each other,
but also to pass it on
to the next generations,
and create an accumulation of know-how, an accumulation of knowledge.
So, this family grows.
And they think, instead of getting organized in family,
why not getting organized in society,
create a small village,
organize a city?
Changing scale, say.
We domesticated water,
we domesticated plants,
we domesticated animals,
we domesticated our wife, maybe,
we sent her to the water chore
so we can fight against invaders.
L: Tss.
G: So, in this society,
there will be people consuming things they didn't produce.
It's huge.
It's a break in time,
thinking, OK, I'll be depending on someone else.
Trust-based society appears.
I'm going to trust him.
I'm going to rely on him
and he will rely on me.
Society is born.
L: We put up fence to protect these places,
to protect the cities,
to protect countries.
We fought to preserve our resources.
Then, one day, after a lot of fighting, man is tired,
he realizes that a northern country where it's raining a lot,
can produce barley and good ale,
but me, in the south, I have the wine and I would like to try beer.
What do I do? I exchange with these countries.
And a dependance appears:
I can't produce beer and I never will.
They can, but then I would depend on them.
Exchanges are the beginning of globalization.
Dependance between countries.
G: So we changed scale.
We changed from "Family organization"
to "we organize together".
We changed from wild and savage nature
to organized nature
with, as game master the man,
who still keeps this instinct saying very loudly:
I must be superior to others.
It's survival instincts.
Except he started to collaborate.
He realized his 'born with' gifts,
as Loïc said,
he can exchange them.
So, back today, we are 7 billion human beings in Earth.
In 2006, we were 6 billion.
Very quickly, the population is increasing,
with that survival instinct, this idea: will I be lacking something?
Is there enough water on Earth?
And there is an idea of scarcity,
I want my country to have this, not the other country.
Except globalization started.
Globalization is exchanging resources,
exchanging what is our advantaging resource.
Today, we are 7 billion on Earth,
but 30 000 people still die because they can't access drinkable water.
It's every second person in a hospital bed
a person who drank undrinkable water.
7 billion people on Earth,
it's more than just Adam and Eve,
if we use that picture of Adam and Eve.
7 billion people on Earth,
is more than one or two billion.
And still, the resource didn't change.
Which proves that human being did adapt.
He adapted so well,
that in the places where we used to live depending on our surroundings,
today, we set up accessories
allowing a pleasant life in the middle of the desert.
And thanks to what? Technology.
So we went from the small pre-agriculture tool
to techniques and large use of this techniques,
thanks to what?
Passing on knowledge.
Which allows us today to be here, talking together.
L: It means that with the same quantity of water
we produce more today than what we used to.
So there is one thing sure:
Today we alone can think as far ahead as 2050,
and know we'll be 9 billion.
Today, we alone have achieved our demographic transition
and we know what allowed us
to stop our exponential growth smoothly and naturally,
and I'm not even talking about what Geoffroy wants to do to the no-guys.
It was sharing knowledge
and education.
Today it's easier for us to help developing countries
by sending money, because we have a lot of that.
We don't go much for 1 year or 2 or 3
to try to share our knowledge.
Why? Because we miss the time.
We hold to our time.
Maybe because we also hold to that knowledge
making our so-called superiority.
We know today that the only thing
able to save those countries
is sharing knowledge,
and it must be bilateral
because we are not at the highest level possible.
The highest level would be to live
with the water we have today,
with the same life style we have today.
So the sharing will be in both directions:
We'll share our knowledge, they'll share their knowledge.
G: Still caught in that same mental state
that we all feel today,
about how can we keep adapting and changing things,
we have some ideas to help you.
First one is about learning from the past.
Which is probably what separates us from the animals.
Actually we don't know that.
Because we didn't yet try to speak to and communicate with the other species.
We are doing the first step though,
which is communicate with each other,
communicate with other countries.
Being more than just a survival instinct
just thinking, "Can I trust him?"
We established a trust-based society in France,
by accepting that interdependence.
We have to keep accepting that interdependence between countries.
To keep evolving,
we must realize that we are part of a whole.
And that whole, doesn't have a center.
Human being is not the center of that whole.
However, human being can help the different parts talking to each other.
Human being has understanding, knowledge -
knowledge that maybe those people, stuck in the wall marble
would have wished for -
to help him plan the future.
(Laughter) Yes...
He should be here to save me, but he's not helping.
(Laughter)
OK so now, we know that human beings are not the masters of the world,
we have to stop thinking the resource will adapt to human beings.
It's the life-style, our life-style that must adapt to the available resource.
So, we often say,
We conquered the world.
But I think it's terrible to think that.
We did conquer water.
But we still have huge places to explore
and Baudelaire maybe saw that.
'To understand with ease The language of flowers and silent things'
Sounds naive, but it shows
that we are not the only ones able to learn lessons from the past,
not the only ones to be eclectics,
not the only ones to be omnivorous,
not the only ones able to go forward.
That's it, we have to do it, with the other species.
Then, we make our talk more pessimistic,
let's hear the young generation, that will follow us,
they will have to take care of the the legacy we will leave them,
it's a dream.
The dream, linking us to the Hadzabes, hunter-gatherer,
linking us to the pastors, with the first farmers.
It's the dream of living together.
And I quote Jacques Brel, "I wish for you dreams which never end,
and the furious desire to achieve some of them."
It's the dream we wish for all of you.
Thank you.
(Applause)