To understand what the situation is, I met five specialists who observe, protect and draw inspiration from biodiversity on a daily basis, in very different contexts. The first of these is a renowned biologist. Former president of the National Museum of Natural History and scientific advisor to Ségolène Royal during COP21, Gilles Boeuf gives me an hour-long interview in which he begins by going back to the history of the term “biodiversity”. Invented in 1985 by American ecologists from the school of conservation biology, the word “biodiversity” refers to the living world. But beware, biodiversity is not limited to the identification of all forms of living things. It also covers the relationships that these forms establish with their environment. “Biodiversity is the living part of nature and the dialogue that it constantly maintains with its mineral part”, explains Gilles Boeuf. “Biodiversity was born out of geodiversity, and the living world is based on the dialogue between the two.” So far everything is clear.

So why is biodiversity so important? “Because that's all we eat!” exclaims the biologist, spontaneously. Human nutrition is based entirely on animal and plant biodiversity. “You can't eat a piece of granite, a glass bottle, or a tire! We only eat things that are organic. So we can't do without it.” In fact, put like that, the problem of the collapse of the living world immediately takes on a new dimension. But biodiversity is essential in many other ways, continues Gilles Boeuf. Already, the permanent symbiosis between the human and the non-human is a guarantee of our good health: “Our body contains at least as many bacteria as there are living human cells! As soon as we are born, a dialogue is established between these bacteria and our cells. When this molecular dialogue does not work, pathologies such as obesity, type 2 diabetes or Alzheimer's can ensue.” Ecosystems also provide innumerable services that allow human beings to survive: pollination is a telling example since it allows humans to consume fruits and vegetables. Finally, biodiversity is the place of an interdependent living network that allows us to exist. “All species depend on each other, and humans are no exception”, insists Gilles Boeuf. In my head, an image appears: that of a gigantic spider web representing the network of living beings in an interconnected way. Everything the researcher tells me feeds into this vision. For example, he points out that a minor disturbance in the balance of an ecosystem can have major repercussions on living beings. Through the effect of chain reactions, the disappearance of elephants in the savannah could lead to the disappearance of a multitude of species that feed on elements present in their defecations.

The next question comes naturally to me. Since humans are an integral part of living things, can one read their attitude towards the ecosystem as self-destructive behavior? “Absolutely!” answers Gilles Boeuf. And to outbid: “Every time the human species attacks living beings, it attacks itself”. “It's a bit stupid, for a species that called itself sapiens (who knows in Latin).”

The words of Gilles Boeuf on the interdependence of the living speak to me, especially since they are corroborated by those of Isabella Salton, director of operations at Instituto Terra, in Brazil. This incredible reforestation program, launched by Lélia and Sebastião Salgado in the Rio Doce Valley 23 years ago, has restored thousands of hectares of degraded forest areas and nearly 2,000 water sources. “It all started in the 1990s,” says Isabella Salton, “a day when Lélia and Sebastião returned to the photographer's childhood home, devastated by years of deforestation and depletion of natural resources. So Lélia had a dream: to replant the forest to restore its natural state.” The years of work that followed were painstaking. “At the beginning, the soil was so poor that nothing could survive,” recalls Isabella Salton. “But we persevered, and the forest grew back. It was then that we realized that everything was connected: the trees grew, the water gushed out and a multitude of animals came back.” After seeing the interdependence of living things with her own eyes, Isabella Salton now shares her conviction: “We are nature! We are part of nature and we also depend on these living beings.”

This reforestation project is also interesting, because it reveals another correlation: that of our economic and social conditions with environmental conditions. By restoring the natural ecosystem of the Rio Doce Valley, Instituto Terra has had a significant social impact. Today, more than 1000 rural families in the Rio Doce Valley benefit from this new environmental framework that allows the success of crops, and therefore the maintenance of younger generations who do not have to leave the region to find other professional opportunities. In order to maintain this impact, Instituto Terra offers training and support in the preservation of water sources.

It seems to me that the spider web metaphor makes even more sense here because it is true on all levels. Not only is our physical and biological condition closely linked to the well-being of the other species in our ecosystem; but all the fields of our society are intertwined with that of biodiversity. To understand the living, it is therefore necessary to think of it with a holistic approach.

When meeting these five experts who study biodiversity, I notice that for many, this transversality is obvious. Mya-Rose Craig, an environmental activist also called “the bird girl” for her worldwide reputation in birding despite her 18 years of age, is a proponent of this holistic approach. At the individual level, this is reflected in what she calls “environmental intersectionality.” In other words, Mya-Rose Craig explains her proximity to nature and her activist commitment by the intertwining of a multitude of factors: her Muslim religion, her Bengali ethnicity, her gender, her gender, her social environment and her family environment in particular. To conclude our interview, she insists on this point: “the fact that I am Bengali and Muslim is at the center of my environmental commitment. It's a kind of binder.”

At the societal level, Mya-Rose Craig systematically analyzes environmental phenomena such as “the decline of biodiversity or global warming” through the prism of a historical, societal and economic context. Thus, about the distance of individuals from nature, she explains that it “would be too simple to say that people simply don't want to be in contact with nature anymore. The history of the United Kingdom has strongly correlated access to nature with class and ethnicity.” This overall vision determines the solutions proposed by Mya-Rose Craig. Thus, in parallel with the awareness-raising and environmental lobbying campaigns that it carries out in the United Kingdom and around the world, the Bird Girl organizes “Black2Nature” camps, so that young people from ethnic minorities have access to nature on the same basis as others.

Mya-Rose Craig's activism illustrates the interconnection of phenomena surrounding biodiversity and proves that our knowledge on the subject cannot be one-sided: it requires an interest in chemistry, physics and biology, as well as in anthropology, economics or philosophy. Gilles Boeuf confirmed this to me at the beginning of our interview. While I jokingly explain to him that he will have to popularize his subject because I studied social sciences and not hard sciences, he immediately answers me that knowledge of social sciences is essential for understanding biodiversity. He will then explain to me that “the complexity of biodiversity must be addressed transversely, through different disciplines, and by people of good will”. The project seems very exciting to me: to understand the living world in its immense and fabulous complexity in order to consider solutions that measure up to the multiple problems of biodiversity.

The differentiation between nature and culture, the founding pillar of Western societies, has pushed us to extract ourselves from living things and to behave as if the exhaustion of natural resources and the collapse of biodiversity would have no impact on our species. This observation is shared by all my interlocutors, who repeatedly use the terms “excess”, “human arrogance”, or “feeling of superiority” during our interviews. Today, the human species is paying the consequences of its actions since it is endangered by the destruction of ecosystems, artificialization, pollution and global warming. “The collapse of living things is probable”, warns Gilles Boeuf. “But as the philosopher Edgar Morin says, in the history of mankind, the probable has often not happened! That is why we are fighting.” The catastrophic scenario we are heading towards is not bound to happen. To change the trajectory of our history, we simply need to integrate the idea that we are living beings and that we belong to this ecosystem that we are destroying. Then we can consider alternative paths in which to engage humanity.

Thus, the first step lies in renewing our vision of the living. In this regard, two initiatives offer interesting ways to put humanity back at the heart of a larger ecosystem to change our relationship with nature.

Hugo Meunier, founder of Merci Raymond, is committed to reconnecting city residents to nature by greening cities. According to him, the disconnection of individuals from nature is due to “the urbanization of the 1980s and 1990s, which is based on a vision of the concrete, motorized city, full of shopping centers”. However, the disconnection is relatively recent, he continues: “while the people of our parents' or grandparents' generation grew up in rural areas before arriving in the city; today an entire generation grew up in the city and never lived in nature.” In 5 years, Merci Raymond has planted more than 150,000 plants and trained 50,000 green hands in 10 French cities. The benefits of greening cities are numerous: psychological well-being, clean air, refreshing temperatures, return of biodiversity... Moreover, as Mya-Rose Craig rightly recalls, “green spaces in cities are particularly important because they represent the only possible access to nature for the less well-off city dwellers”. The Black2Nature camps organized by the activist also aim to give young beneficiaries the opportunity to “connect with nature”, which promotes “the development of their environmental awareness on topics such as deforestation, global warming or the decline of biodiversity; because people cannot attach importance to these topics if they have never known nature”.

This first stage has a sequel, which Gilles Boeuf describes to me. When we know how to put our hubris and arrogance aside and place ourselves as an organic being part of a large ecosystem, we will be able to “change our perspective” to “understand that each living being has its importance, its intelligence, its beauty”. And it is precisely in biodiversity itself, with this state of mind, that we will find the answers to our questions, explains the researcher to me. This is called biomimicry, or bioinspiration.

Franck Zal, a marine biology researcher, is a keen expert. “The problem is that we consider nature and biodiversity as sources of exploitation,” he laments. “However, they should not be exhausted by humans but observed for replication. All the breakthrough innovations we need have already been implemented in nature! Someone understood it before you and me: Leonardo da Vinci said “look at nature, that's where your future is”: you must therefore know how to observe and describe it in order to exploit it intelligently”.

In his Hémarina laboratory, Franck Zal has been studying a marine worm for several years now, whose blood properties are an immense source of inspiration to create technical and therapeutic solutions adapted to humans. “Thanks to its characteristics as a universal blood donor, we have designed bandages, additive solutions to increase the survival of grafts after transplantation, or solutions to oxygenate an entire organism”, says the researcher. Subsequently, Franck Zal quotes me a set of inventions that come from a source of natural inspiration: penicillin, which is a fungus capable of killing bacteria, or surgical thread, which resembles the extremely resistant threads connecting mussels to their rock. Biodiversity therefore represents an “extraordinary innovation library” that must be protected.

But to place yourself in the living world and be inspired by it, you must first have the keys to observe it. The human discourse on our belonging to nature and training in the observation of biodiversity are therefore key. Finally, this is perhaps the aspect that unites the work of Gilles Boeuf, Isabella Salton, Mya-Rose Craig, Hugo Meunier and Franck Zal in their respective structures: each in their own way, they help us to put new words and a new look at biodiversity in order to find the balance that will ensure our survival by protecting the living world.

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