WEBVTT

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I'm not sure that every person here

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is familiar with my pictures.

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I want to start to show just a few pictures to you,

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and after I'll speak.

NOTE Paragraph

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I must speak to you a little bit of my history,

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because we'll be speaking on this

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during my speech here.

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I was born in 1944 in Brazil,

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in the times that Brazil was not yet a market economy.

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I was born on a farm,

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a farm that was more than 50 percent rainforest [still].

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A marvelous place.

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I lived with incredible birds, incredible animals,

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I swam in our small rivers with our caimans.

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It was about 35 families that lived on this farm,

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and everything that we produced on this farm, we consumed.

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Very few things went to the market.

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Once a year, the only thing that went to the market

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was the cattle that we produced,

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and we made trips of about 45 days

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to reach the slaughterhouse,

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bringing thousands of head of cattle,

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and about 20 days traveling back

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to reach our farm again.

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When I was 15 years old,

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it was necessary for me to leave this place

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and go to a town a little bit bigger -- much bigger --

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where I did the second part of secondary school.

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There I learned different things.

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Brazil was starting to urbanize, industrialize,

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and I knew the politics. I became a little bit radical,

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I was a member of leftist parties,

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and I became an activist.

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I [went to] university to become an economist.

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I [did] a master's degree in economics.

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And the most important thing in my life

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also happened in this time.

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I met an incredible girl

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who became my lifelong best friend,

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and my associate in everything that I have done till now,

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my wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado.

NOTE Paragraph

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Brazil radicalized very strongly.

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We fought very hard against the dictatorship,

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in a moment it was necessary to us:

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Either go into clandestinity with weapons in hand,

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or leave Brazil. We were too young,

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and our organization thought it was better for us to go out,

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and we went to France,

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where I did a PhD in economics,

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Léila became an architect.

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I worked after for an investment bank.

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We made a lot of trips, financed development,

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economic projects in Africa with the World Bank.

NOTE Paragraph

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And one day photography made a total invasion in my life.

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I became a photographer,

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abandoned everything and became a photographer,

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and I started to do the photography

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that was important for me.

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Many people tell me that you are a photojournalist,

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that you are an anthropologist photographer,

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that you are an activist photographer.

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But I did much more than that.

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I put photography as my life.

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I lived totally inside photography

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doing long term projects,

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and I want to show you just a few pictures

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of -- again, you'll see inside the social projects,

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that I went to, I published many books

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on these photographs,

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but I'll just show you a few ones now.

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In the '90s, from 1994 to 2000,

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I photographed a story called Migrations.

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It became a book. It became a show.

NOTE Paragraph

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But during the time that I was photographing this,

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I lived through a very hard moment in my life, mostly in Rwanda.

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I saw in Rwanda total brutality.

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I saw deaths by thousands per day.

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I lost my faith in our species.

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I didn't believe that it was possible for us to live any longer,

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and I started to be attacked by my own Staphylococcus.

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I started to have infection everywhere.

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When I made love with my wife, I had no sperm that came out of me;

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I had blood.

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I went to see a friend's doctor in Paris,

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told him that I was completely sick.

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He made a long examination, and told me, "Sebastian,

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you are not sick, your prostate is perfect.

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What happened is, you saw so many deaths that you are dying.

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You must stop. Stop.

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You must stop because on the contrary, you will be dead."

NOTE Paragraph

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And I made the decision to stop.

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I was really upset with photography,

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with everything in the world,

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and I made the decision to go back to where I was born.

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It was a big coincidence.

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It was the moment that my parents became very old.

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I have seven sisters. I'm one of the only men in my family,

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and they made together the decision

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to transfer this land to Léila and myself.

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When we received this land, this land was as dead as I was.

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When I was a kid, it was more than 50 percent rainforest.

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When we received the land,

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it was less than half a percent rainforest,

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as in all my region.

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To build development, Brazilian development,

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we destroyed a lot of our forest.

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As you did here in the United States,

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or you did in India, everywhere in this planet.

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To build our development,

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we come to a huge contradiction

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that we destroy around us everything.

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This farm that had thousands of head of cattle

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had just a few hundreds,

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and we didn't know how to deal with these.

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And Léila came up with an incredible idea, a crazy idea.

NOTE Paragraph

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She said, why don't you put back the rainforest that was here before?

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You say that you were born in paradise.

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Let's build the paradise again.

NOTE Paragraph

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And I went to see a good friend

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that was engineering forests

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to prepare a project for us,

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and we started. We started to plant, and this

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first year we lost a lot of trees, second year less,

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and slowly, slowly this dead land started to be born again.

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We started to plant hundreds of thousands of trees,

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only local species, only native species,

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where we built an ecosystem identical to the one that was destroyed,

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and the life started to come back in an incredible way.

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It was necessary for us to transform our land

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into a national park.

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We transformed. We gave this land back to nature.

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It became a national park.

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We created an institution called Instituto Terra,

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and we built a big environmental project to raise money everywhere.

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Here in Los Angeles, in the Bay Area in San Francisco,

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it became tax deductible in the United States.

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We raised money in Spain, in Italy, a lot in Brazil.

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We worked with a lot of companies in Brazil

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that put money into this project, the government.

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And the life started to come, and I had a big wish

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to come back to photography, to photograph again.

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And this time, my wish was not to photograph anymore

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just one animal that I had photographed all my life: us.

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I wished to photograph the other animals,

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to photograph the landscapes,

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to photograph us, but us from the beginning,

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the time we lived in equilibrium with nature.

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And I went. I started in the beginning of 2004,

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and I finished at the end of 2011.

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We created an incredible amount of pictures,

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and the result -- Lélia did the design of all my books,

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the design of all my shows. She is the creator of the shows.

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And what we want with these pictures

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is to create a discussion about what we have that is pristine on the planet

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and what we must hold on this planet

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if we want to live, to have some equilibrium in our life.

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And I wanted to see us

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when we used, yes, our instruments in stone.

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We exist yet. I was last week

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at the Brazilian National Indian Foundation,

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and only in the Amazon we have about 110 groups

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of Indians that are not contacted yet.

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We must protect the forest in this sense.

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And with these pictures, I hope that we can create

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information, a system of information.

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We tried to do a new presentation of the planet,

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and I want to show you now just a few pictures

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of this project, please.

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Well, this — (Applause) —

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Thank you. Thank you very much.

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This is what we must fight hard

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to hold like it is now.

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But there is another part that we must together rebuild,

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to build our societies, our modern family of societies,

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we are at a point where we cannot go back.

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But we create an incredible contradiction.

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To build all this, we destroy a lot.

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Our forest in Brazil, that antique forest

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that was the size of California,

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is destroyed today 93 percent.

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Here, on the West Coast, you've destroyed your forest.

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Around here, no? The redwood forests are gone.

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Gone very fast, disappeared.

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Coming the other day from Atlanta, here, two days ago,

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I was flying over deserts

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that we made, we provoked with our own hands.

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India has no more trees. Spain has no more trees.

NOTE Paragraph

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And we must rebuild these forests.

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That is the essence of our life, these forests.

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We need to breathe. The only factory

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capable to transform CO2 into oxygen,

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are the forests.

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The only machine capable to capture the carbon

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that we are producing, always,

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even if we reduce them, everything that we do, we produce CO2,

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are the trees.

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I put the question -- three or four weeks ago,

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we saw in the newspapers

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millions of fish that die in Norway.

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A lack of oxygen in the water.

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I put to myself the question, if for a moment,

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we will not lack oxygen for all animal species,

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ours included -- that would be very complicated for us.

NOTE Paragraph

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For the water system, the trees are essential.

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I'll give you a small example that you'll understand very easily.

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You happy people that have a lot of hair on your head,

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if you take a shower, it takes you

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two or three hours to dry your hair

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if you don't use a dryer machine.

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Me, one minute, it's dry. The same with the trees.

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The trees are the hair of our planet.

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When you have rain in a place that has no trees,

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in just a few minutes, the water arrives in the stream,

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brings soil, destroying our water source,

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destroying the rivers,

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and no humidity to retain.

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When you have trees, the root system holds the water.

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All the branches of the trees, the leaves that come down

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create a humid area,

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and they take months and months under the water, go to the rivers,

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and maintain our source, maintain our rivers.

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This is the most important thing,

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when we imagine that we need water for every activity in life.

NOTE Paragraph

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I want to show you now, to finish,

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just a few pictures that for me

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are very important in that direction.

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You remember that I told you,

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when I received the farm from my parents

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that was my paradise, that was the farm.

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Land completely destroyed, the erosion there, the land had dried.

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But you can see in this picture,

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we were starting to construct an educational center

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that became quite a large environmental center in Brazil.

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But you see a lot of small spots in this picture.

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In each point of those spots, we had planted a tree.

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There are thousands of trees.

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Now I'll show you the pictures made exactly in the same point

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two months ago.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

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I told you in the beginning that it was necessary

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for us to plant about 2.5 million trees

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of about 200 different species

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in order to rebuild the ecosystem.

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And I'll show you the last picture.

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We are with two million trees in the ground now.

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We are doing the sequestration

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of about 100,000 tons of carbon with these trees.

NOTE Paragraph

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My friends, it's very easy to do. We did it, no?

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By an accident that happened to me,

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we went back, we built an ecosystem.

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We here inside the room,

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I believe that we have the same concern,

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and the model that we created in Brazil,

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we can transplant it here.

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We can apply it everywhere around the world, no?

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And I believe that we can do it together.

NOTE Paragraph

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Thank you very much.

NOTE Paragraph

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(Applause)