Listen to me please. You’re like me, a homo sapiens, a wise human. Life, a miracle of the universe appeared around four billion years ago and we humans only 200 thousand years ago. Yet we have succeeded in disrupting the balance that is so essential to life on Earth. 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 formed in the wake of its star. The sun, a cloud of a good knitted dust particles similar to so many similar clusters in the universe. Yet this was 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 four 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 wreaths of smoke curling from the bowels of the Earth bare 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. But the Earth had an exceptional future, offered to it by water. At the right distance from the sun-not too far, not too near-the Earth was able to conserve water in liquid form. Water vapor condensed and fell in torrential downpours on Earth, and rivers appeared.
The rivers shaped the surface of the Earth, cutting their channels, furrowing out valleys. They ran toward the lowest places on the globe to form the oceans. They tore minerals from the rocks and gradually the freshwater of the oceans became heavy with salt. Water is a vital liquid. It irrigated these sterile expanses. The paths it traced are like the veins of a body, the branches of a tree, the vessels of the sap that it brought to the Earth. Nearly four billion years later; somewhere on Earth can still be found these works of art, left by the volcanoes’ ash, mixed with water from Iceland’s glaciers. There they are-matter and water, water and matter, soft and hard combined, the crucial alliance shared by every life-form on our planet. Minerals and metals are even older than the Earth.
They are stardust. They provide the Earth’s colors. Red from iron, black from carbon, blue from copper, yellow from sulfur. 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 archaeobacteria. 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 bacterias and their billions of descendants change 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. We can read this chapter of the Earth’s history nowhere better than on the walls of Colorado’s Grand Canyon. They reveal nearly two billion years of the Earth’s history. Once upon a time, the Grand Canyon was a sea inhabited by microorganisms. They grew their shells by tapping into carbon from the atmosphere dissolved in the ocean. When they died, the shells sank and accumulated on the seabed. These strata are the product of those billions and billions of shells. 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 traces of the forces that water deploys when it freezes. Lighter than water, the ice floats, rather than sinking to the bottom. 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. thus, clouds form over the oceans and bring rain to the landmasses, whose rivers carry water back to the oceans. Sharing is everything. The green expanse peeking through the clouds is the source of oxygen in the air. Seventy percent 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 exist 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. The Great Barrier Reef, off the coast of Australia stretches over 350,000 square kilometers and is home to 1,500 species of fish, 4,000 species of mollusks and 400 species of coral. The equilibrium of every ocean depends on these corals. The Earth counts time in billions of years. It took more than four billion years for it to make trees. In a 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 those minuscule 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, the soils that are indispensable to life are formed. Soils are the factory of biodiversity. They are a world of incessant activity where microorganisms feed, dig, aerate and transform. 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 10th of them? A hundredth perhaps? What do we know about he bonds that link them? The Earth is a miracle. Life remains a mystery. Families of animals form united by customs and rituals that survive today. Some adapt to the nature of their pasture, and their pasture adapts to them. And both gained. 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 four-billion-year-old legacy bequeathed by the Earth. You’re 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 swaths 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. Human genius inspired them to build canoes, an invention that opened up new horizons and turned humans into navigators.
Even today the majority of mankind lives on the continents’ coastlines or the banks of rivers and lakes. The first towns grew up less than 600 years ago. It was a considerable leap in human history. Why towns? Because they allowed humans to defend themselves more easily. They became social beings meeting and sharing knowledge and crafts, blending their similarities and differences. In a word, they became civilized. But the only energy at their disposal was provided by nature and the strength of their bodies. It was the story of humankind for thousands of years. It still is for one person in four-over one and a half billion human beings, more than the combined population of all the wealthy nations. Taking from the Earth only the strictly necessary. For a long time, the relationship between humans and the planet was evenly balanced. For a long time, the economy seemed like a natural and equitable alliance. 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. The Earth feeds people, clothes them and provides for their daily needs. Everything comes from the Earth. Towns change humanity’s nature as well as its destiny. The farmer becomes a craftsman, trader or peddler. What the Earth gives the farmer, the city dweller buys, sells or barters. Goods changed hands along with ideas. Humanity’s genius is to have always had a sense of its weakness. Humans tried to extend the frontiers of their territory, but they knew their limits. The physical energy and strength with which nature had not endowed them was found in the animals they domesticated to serve them. But how can you conquer the world on an empty stomach?
The invention of agriculture transformed the future of the wild animals scavenging for food that were humankind. Agriculture turned their history on end. Agriculture was their first great revolution. Developed barely 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, it changed their relationship to nature. It brought an end to the uncertainty of hunting and gathering. It resulted in the first surpluses and gave birth to ci
Listen to me please. You’re like me, a homo sapiens, a wise human. Life, a miracle of the universe appeared around four billion years ago and we humans only 200 thousand years ago. Yet we have succeeded in disrupting the balance that is so essential to life on Earth. 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 formed in the wake of its star. The sun, a cloud of a good knitted dust particles similar to so many similar clusters in the universe. Yet this was 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 four 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 wreaths of smoke curling from the bowels of the Earth bare 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. But the Earth had an exceptional future, offered to it by water. At the right distance from the sun-not too far, not too near-the Earth was able to conserve water in liquid form. Water vapor condensed and fell in torrential downpours on Earth, and rivers appeared.
The rivers shaped the surface of the Earth, cutting their channels, furrowing out valleys. They ran toward the lowest places on the globe to form the oceans. They tore minerals from the rocks and gradually the freshwater of the oceans became heavy with salt. Water is a vital liquid. It irrigated these sterile expanses. The paths it traced are like the veins of a body, the branches of a tree, the vessels of the sap that it brought to the Earth. Nearly four billion years later; somewhere on Earth can still be found these works of art, left by the volcanoes’ ash, mixed with water from Iceland’s glaciers. There they are-matter and water, water and matter, soft and hard combined, the crucial alliance shared by every life-form on our planet. Minerals and metals are even older than the Earth.
They are stardust. They provide the Earth’s colors. Red from iron, black from carbon, blue from copper, yellow from sulfur. 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 archaeobacteria. 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 bacterias and their billions of descendants change 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. We can read this chapter of the Earth’s history nowhere better than on the walls of Colorado’s Grand Canyon. They reveal nearly two billion years of the Earth’s history. Once upon a time, the Grand Canyon was a sea inhabited by microorganisms. They grew their shells by tapping into carbon from the atmosphere dissolved in the ocean. When they died, the shells sank and accumulated on the seabed. These strata are the product of those billions and billions of shells. 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 traces of the forces that water deploys when it freezes. Lighter than water, the ice floats, rather than sinking to the bottom. 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. thus, clouds form over the oceans and bring rain to the landmasses, whose rivers carry water back to the oceans. Sharing is everything. The green expanse peeking through the clouds is the source of oxygen in the air. Seventy percent 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 exist 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. The Great Barrier Reef, off the coast of Australia stretches over 350,000 square kilometers and is home to 1,500 species of fish, 4,000 species of mollusks and 400 species of coral. The equilibrium of every ocean depends on these corals. The Earth counts time in billions of years. It took more than four billion years for it to make trees. In a 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 those minuscule 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, the soils that are indispensable to life are formed. Soils are the factory of biodiversity. They are a world of incessant activity where microorganisms feed, dig, aerate and transform. 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 10th of them? A hundredth perhaps? What do we know about he bonds that link them? The Earth is a miracle. Life remains a mystery. Families of animals form united by customs and rituals that survive today. Some adapt to the nature of their pasture, and their pasture adapts to them. And both gained. 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 four-billion-year-old legacy bequeathed by the Earth. You’re 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 swaths 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. Human genius inspired them to build canoes, an invention that opened up new horizons and turned humans into navigators.
Even today the majority of mankind lives on the continents’ coastlines or the banks of rivers and lakes. The first towns grew up less than 600 years ago. It was a considerable leap in human history. Why towns? Because they allowed humans to defend themselves more easily. They became social beings meeting and sharing knowledge and crafts, blending their similarities and differences. In a word, they became civilized. But the only energy at their disposal was provided by nature and the strength of their bodies. It was the story of humankind for thousands of years. It still is for one person in four-over one and a half billion human beings, more than the combined population of all the wealthy nations. Taking from the Earth only the strictly necessary. For a long time, the relationship between humans and the planet was evenly balanced. For a long time, the economy seemed like a natural and equitable alliance. 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. The Earth feeds people, clothes them and provides for their daily needs. Everything comes from the Earth. Towns change humanity’s nature as well as its destiny. The farmer becomes a craftsman, trader or peddler. What the Earth gives the farmer, the city dweller buys, sells or barters. Goods changed hands along with ideas. Humanity’s genius is to have always had a sense of its weakness. Humans tried to extend the frontiers of their territory, but they knew their limits. The physical energy and strength with which nature had not endowed them was found in the animals they domesticated to serve them. But how can you conquer the world on an empty stomach?
The invention of agriculture transformed the future of the wild animals scavenging for food that were humankind. Agriculture turned their history on end. Agriculture was their first great revolution. Developed barely 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, it changed their relationship to nature. It brought an end to the uncertainty of hunting and gathering. It resulted in the first surpluses and gave birth to ci
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Listen to me please. You’re like me, a homo sapiens, a wise human. Life, a miracle of the universe appeared around four billion years ago and we humans only 200 thousand years ago. Yet we have succeeded in disrupting the balance that is so essential to life on Earth. 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 formed in the wake of its star. The sun, a cloud of a good knitted dust particles similar to so many similar clusters in the universe. Yet this was 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 four 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 wreaths of smoke curling from the bowels of the Earth bare 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. But the Earth had an exceptional future, offered to it by water. At the right distance from the sun-not too far, not too near-the Earth was able to conserve water in liquid form. Water vapor condensed and fell in torrential downpours on Earth, and rivers appeared.
The rivers shaped the surface of the Earth, cutting their channels, furrowing out valleys. They ran toward the lowest places on the globe to form the oceans. They tore minerals from the rocks and gradually the freshwater of the oceans became heavy with salt. Water is a vital liquid. It irrigated these sterile expanses. The paths it traced are like the veins of a body, the branches of a tree, the vessels of the sap that it brought to the Earth. Nearly four billion years later; somewhere on Earth can still be found these works of art, left by the volcanoes’ ash, mixed with water from Iceland’s glaciers. There they are-matter and water, water and matter, soft and hard combined, the crucial alliance shared by every life-form on our planet. Minerals and metals are even older than the Earth.
They are stardust. They provide the Earth’s colors. Red from iron, black from carbon, blue from copper, yellow from sulfur. 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 archaeobacteria. 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 bacterias and their billions of descendants change 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. We can read this chapter of the Earth’s history nowhere better than on the walls of Colorado’s Grand Canyon. They reveal nearly two billion years of the Earth’s history. Once upon a time, the Grand Canyon was a sea inhabited by microorganisms. They grew their shells by tapping into carbon from the atmosphere dissolved in the ocean. When they died, the shells sank and accumulated on the seabed. These strata are the product of those billions and billions of shells. 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 traces of the forces that water deploys when it freezes. Lighter than water, the ice floats, rather than sinking to the bottom. 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. thus, clouds form over the oceans and bring rain to the landmasses, whose rivers carry water back to the oceans. Sharing is everything. The green expanse peeking through the clouds is the source of oxygen in the air. Seventy percent 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 exist 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. The Great Barrier Reef, off the coast of Australia stretches over 350,000 square kilometers and is home to 1,500 species of fish, 4,000 species of mollusks and 400 species of coral. The equilibrium of every ocean depends on these corals. The Earth counts time in billions of years. It took more than four billion years for it to make trees. In a 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 those minuscule 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, the soils that are indispensable to life are formed. Soils are the factory of biodiversity. They are a world of incessant activity where microorganisms feed, dig, aerate and transform. 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 10th of them? A hundredth perhaps? What do we know about he bonds that link them? The Earth is a miracle. Life remains a mystery. Families of animals form united by customs and rituals that survive today. Some adapt to the nature of their pasture, and their pasture adapts to them. And both gained. 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 four-billion-year-old legacy bequeathed by the Earth. You’re 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 swaths 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. Human genius inspired them to build canoes, an invention that opened up new horizons and turned humans into navigators.
Even today the majority of mankind lives on the continents’ coastlines or the banks of rivers and lakes. The first towns grew up less than 600 years ago. It was a considerable leap in human history. Why towns? Because they allowed humans to defend themselves more easily. They became social beings meeting and sharing knowledge and crafts, blending their similarities and differences. In a word, they became civilized. But the only energy at their disposal was provided by nature and the strength of their bodies. It was the story of humankind for thousands of years. It still is for one person in four-over one and a half billion human beings, more than the combined population of all the wealthy nations. Taking from the Earth only the strictly necessary. For a long time, the relationship between humans and the planet was evenly balanced. For a long time, the economy seemed like a natural and equitable alliance. 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. The Earth feeds people, clothes them and provides for their daily needs. Everything comes from the Earth. Towns change humanity’s nature as well as its destiny. The farmer becomes a craftsman, trader or peddler. What the Earth gives the farmer, the city dweller buys, sells or barters. Goods changed hands along with ideas. Humanity’s genius is to have always had a sense of its weakness. Humans tried to extend the frontiers of their territory, but they knew their limits. The physical energy and strength with which nature had not endowed them was found in the animals they domesticated to serve them. But how can you conquer the world on an empty stomach?
The invention of agriculture transformed the future of the wild animals scavenging for food that were humankind. Agriculture turned their history on end. Agriculture was their first great revolution. Developed barely 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, it changed their relationship to nature. It brought an end to the uncertainty of hunting and gathering. It resulted in the first surpluses and gave birth to ci
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