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Climatic upheaval is biological upheaval, low-noise but massive and rapid, as evidenced by the latest IPCC report. We are entering the era of the "Anthropocene" with a bang, as Nobel Prize-winning chemist and meteorologist Paul Crutzen suggested in the early 2000s. A new geological epoch where people are the main force for change on our planet, overcoming geophysical forces.

“If the history of the Earth were concentrated in twenty-four hours, the Anthropocene would have begun in the very last thousandths of a second, explains the documentary filmmaker Tao Favre. This shows the complexity of our planet, with which we have collided. His podcast makes this collapse audible, in a rich documentary series in four episodes, and leads a fascinating reflection on the meaning of human adventure, in a topical critique of the idea of ​​infinite progress and the deadly homogenization of the living. .

To welcome us, the first episode (“Where the Living Crumbles”) sets the scene for spring without birdsong. With several ecologists, Tao Favre draws up the balance sheet and the chain consequences of the collapse of biodiversity in the countryside. Above all, an important preliminary to action and political choices, it questions the overhanging relationship that the industrialized spheres of the world have woven with nature since the perfecting of the steam engine in the 18th century, as if we were no longer ourselves a structuring part of the ecosystems.

Clear speech

Then the documentary deepens, with the help of the history of scientific ecology, the tremendous potential that resides in the idea and the gesture of weaving another link with nature, which would be made of knowledge and inspirations, to imagine systems that are resilient because they are symbiotic (episode 2, "Ecology or Death").

Produced before the outbreak of Covid-19, the documentary series has not aged a bit, on the contrary. Eco-districts, urban gardens, green roofs: the third episode ("The possibility of a green city") questions the paradoxes of urban developments which, while artificialising ever more soil, also seek to give back space to the living so that the city ​​remains… livable.

In the fourth and final episode ("Des mondes à compose"), through multiple experiences, at school or in a deferred development zone, the power of diversity and networks is celebrated with an openness to other stories.

To make his documentary, Tao Favre met ecologists and philosophers, whose words are crystal clear, but also committed citizens. He surveyed the grounds and, thanks to a decentered approach and traveling on several scales, draws and reaffirms knowledge likely to restore a political "agency" (capacity to act), contrary to the mirror with the larks held up by techno-solutionism.

The documentary breaks the impasse of the nature-culture relationship to think of other relationships to energy, agriculture and our habitats. A regenerating reflection, like an energetic echo of the work of the philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour, on the place of humans in their ecosystem: head on shoulders because feet on the ground.