Humans and Nature: Are We Part of the Ecosystem? Roles for Entertainment and Technology

Cacau Araujo:

We need a reboot. A general, comprehensive, collective transformation in the concepts surrounding humans and nature. I’m not questioning human nature and what it is or what is not expected for us, humankind, to behave. I’m talking about the idea that us humans have a relationship with nature. We must understand that we are nature ourselves. It can get hard to get there. And for me it is because especially for those who live in urban settings, it might get a little bit difficult to place ourselves inside the environments that we inhabit. As an example, let me show you something.

” And this is what I found. Some drawings, some pictures, some schemes explaining what an ecosystem is, definitions, examples, types of ecosystem, a link to a trivia of ecosystem. Well, and then animals, fish, birds, turtles, and plants, flowers, trees, the sun, the earth, you name it. But you know who’s not around? You are not there. I’m not there. We, the humans, we are not there. I couldn’t find a human figure. Of course, this is just a silly exercise and if I keep scrolling down long enough, I will bump into a human hand holding a globe with butterflies flying around or what seems to be a meeting where people are probably discussing some environmental issues or something like that.

But the thing is none of those images made me feel like a part of it. And nature works in systems. Those systems make biodiversity stronger. They are collaborative, they are interdisciplinary, and they know how to use the best from the multiple wisdom that is part of it. We have this chance of learning from those various bits of knowledge that nature has to offer because nature itself is the best teacher about preservation and resilience and even transformation. Take the Amazon for instance. It’s the biggest rainforest that we still have in the planet.

And the rainforests, they cover less than 10% of Earth’s land surface and they are home to approximately 50 million human inhabitants and over half of the planet’s biodiversity is there. It means that in under 10% of a specific kind of environment, we have the most biodiverse ecosystems. And we have a very limited understanding of what’s going on in these environments because they’re so dense, they’re complex, and they’re vast. So, the first step toward understanding is connection. And about that, let me just share a quick personal story. Last year I had a baby and during my maternity leave, every day kind of looked like the other and in one of those afternoons, the day became night.

m. m. Instead, but no. It was the middle of the afternoon in São Paulo, the largest city in Latin America, and day became night. Social media went crazy. Everybody was like, “Is this the apocalypse? ” And it was not the apocalypse yet. Might be a glimpse of what it can look like if we do nothing. But even though it was a day in winter, so the day was a little bit grayish, according to specialists, it was the smoke coming from big wildfires in the Amazon that made the day go completely dark.

These smoke clouds, they are common in the Amazon region and the material that comes out of them can lead to severe breathing problems, especially in children. 5 million people in the region breathe poor quality air below the recommended by the World Health Organization and sometimes even worse air than São Paulo city center, for example. That’s a way people from big cities can connect to the Amazon, right? But is this the way we want to connect with it? If everything works in a systemic form, when we are aiming for preservation, of course, this is a great thing and we should be aiming for that.

We have to respect and foster systemic approaches as well. And to conquer real, groundbreaking, fresh paradigms, brand new world type of change, it has to be systemic. We have to make systemic changes to accomplish that. So, we must move all the structures available and maybe even create new ones to get there. Technology, media, politics, communications, the pure sciences, all that combined with ancestral and traditional knowledge, they should work together towards preservation. Because that way is how life can be sustainable for all beings, ourselves included. When we talk about preserving the Amazon, we are talking about the need for a bioeconomy that values the standing forest.

We are talking about novel technology for good. We are stating that development cannot be a synonym for destruction. That’s what we’re talking about. But it can be also us talking about how entertainment can inspire a new generation of activists committed to protect the Amazon. Aruanas was a TV series inspired by real events, although it was a fiction. It told the story of four activists risking their lives to investigate illegal mining activities in a protected area in the Amazon. And a lot of what happened in the 10 episodes was based on true facts, either from news pieces or from stories shared by activists that were consulted.

And while the rates of deforestation at the Amazon broke records in the middle of the coronavirus outbreak in Brazil, Aruanas was broadcast on Globo, that’s a media giant, and it hit peak audience rates. The polls registered that around 34 million people watched every episode every week. For the launch of the series online, we got together with 20 environmental and human rights organizations from Brazil and abroad to create collectively the way we would announce the series worldwide. It’s also about working together with XPRIZE Foundation to create a $10 million prize to bring together emerging technology and traditional experience and knowledge from the traditional communities, the local communities, the indigenous communities, and bring that all together to survey biodiversity, joining those forces to show the abundance of ecosystems in the rainforests.

It’s also about giving opportunity for children around the globe to team up with their peers and educators to create projects focused on taking care of forests. And this is the Rainforest Kids Challenge. It wants to educate children about the importance of the standing forest and encourage them to be a part of a community that cares about restoring the forest. That way they might even realize they are nature from early on. That’s something that’s inside the kids and we might just preserve that as well. Well, at Alana, we’ve been experimenting with different ways of approaching solutions for those matters that we consider key for assuring the whole development of children, to foster new ways of well-being, to make the world more just and sustainable for the next generations.

And we are working to open paths of dialogue, spaces for action, where common learning and collective movements drive those needed transformations. Nobody’s going to save the planet alone because that’s just not the way nature works and neither should be the way we are working. So, I propose integration instead of detachment. I propose caring in place of destruction. A brand new study published in Nature earlier this week said that restoring a strategic portion of land to a wild state would help mitigate climate change and avoid more than 70% of the predicted animal and plant extinctions on land.

So, there is still time, but we don’t have time to waste. So, we must choose the part we want to play in the ecosystems that surround us. I want to have a role in what a balanced system is. I want to be a part of it. I want to be the Cerrado, I want to be the Caatinga, the Pantanal, I want to be the Amazon. Thank you.