My name is Francis Hall?.
I've spent my life in forests,
watching trees be born, grow and die.
As I couldn't see them growing,
I presumed they were immobile.
Because I couldn't hear them,
I imagined they were silent.
Over time.
I discovered they were prodigiously alive.
When I first became a bolnnist, I never imagined
that the great tropical forests would vanish before my eyes
in barely 50 Year?'-.
They were so huge...
Millions of years ago, we were born in the highest branches of the canopy
but we have forgotten that.
Before it's too late, I would like
to share this lifetime journey with you.
Tell you about my great passion,
the story of the trees of the great tropical forests.
ONCE UPON A FOREST
I have visited all the world's forests.
I have walked on the canopy.
I have explored miles of undergrowth.
At all times,
I was amazed by the great trees' ability
to live without moving.
How many times have these wooden beings
challenged my own intelligence?
To live... without moving.
They have invented another way of being alive,
almost imperceptible.
The mysterious universe of plant genius.
In the tropical primary forest,
I have seen our world's greatest beauties and riches.
Billions of plants, billions of animals,
all mutually indispensable, intimately connected,
sometimes so close that they end up blending.
I have seen men seize ancient trees in just days.
In no time at all, one can destroy, take, collect
and chop them down.
Yet hew many centuries are needed to rebuild?
How can the process be reversed?
This feeling of helplessness fills me with anger
and sadness.
Since the dawn of time,
plants have given us the air that we breathe.
Must they vanish for us to remember that?
Who can recreate life?
Life alone.
It's a matter of time.
The great trees that lived here have sown a multitude of seeds,
season after season, just in case.
The shade of the undergrowth acted like a sleeping spell on them.
They will now mend the mutilated forest.
Light invites them to begin the story anew.
The forest will outlive us. It has the power of rebirth.
But only if men leave it in peace
for more than seven centuries.
This is where the tale of a rebirth begins.
These trees are pioneers.
They grow rapidly. They are all alike.
In a few days, they sprout.
In a few months, they shelter the ground with their leaves.
Water, air and sun
enter the pioneers' leaves.
Chlorophyll transforms them.
A huge being rises up.
A tree!
The miracle of photosynthesis.
In their rush towards the sun,
the pioneers cannot create defences
to fight the herbivores that attack their first leaves.
And when its damaged leaves cannot capture the light,
the tree dies, deprived of energy.
To repel attacks, certain pioneers call animals to the rescue.
When Cecropia grows a new leaf,
things that look just like ant eggs appear at its base.
The result is instant.
The ants open small doors created by the tree
along its stem.
The ants make themselves at home.
They bore openings between each level.
The insects soon occupy Cocropia mror its full height.
Cecropia can grow in peace.
Its tenants ensure its defence.
50 years after the first seeds germinate,
the pioneers reach maturity.
They won't live any longer.
Born at the same time,
they die together.
The brevity of their existence is inscribed in their genes.
The minute fauna hidden in the ground
turns this forest of dead wood
into a rich, loose humus.
This is the unsettling world of the deoomposers.
They digest everything that falls to the ground
to return it to the cycle of life.
The secondary forest
replaces the primary one.
Its trees sprouted in the pioneers' shade.
They are nourished by their fallen wood.
Thus begins the second stage in the forests reconstruction.
It will lake several centuries
to put back together the huge puzzle
wiped out by deforestation.
Light, once again, organises the layout of the undergrowth.
The countless leaves, like solar cells,
the branches that raise the leaves to the sun,
the big trunks that lift the treetops to the sky...
Being a tree means excelling in the art of slanding, balanced.
As the branches spread, the base of the trunk grows thicker,
strengthening the giant's foundation.
The underground world of trees
is as vast and important as the visible part.
Roots don't: really act as anchors.
They are above all water collectors.
They work with strange filaments, fungi,
secret but key actors in the life of the forest.
Water is vital for trees.
The fungi help the reels to collect it
by spreading their minute tentacles beneath the surface.
In return, the tree shares the energy from its aerial parts with them.
After one hundred years,
the secondary forest is still like an empty shell.
Over five centuries,
it will host more and more living creatures
and a rich and varied plant life
that will connect with each other.
The interaction begins on every level of the undergrowth,
from the infinitely small to the infinitely large.
Wnes spread before the undergrowth is cast into shadow.
I find these plants phenomenal.
They don't tire themselves making huge, sedentary trunks.
Others do that for them.
Discreet on the ground,
they follow the shade of a tree's trunk.
Having found a base,
they climb up to the sky to gorge on the sun.
The philodendron vine fascinates me.
It is camou?aged by the bark
near the ground, within reach of predators' jaws.
A few feet higher up, it becomes exuberant,
as if it finally felt safe.
How did this plant acquire such a subtle strategy?
That mystery is beyond me.
I'm particularly fond of the passion vine's story.
You know this plant.
It bears the delicious passion fruit.
Let's digress with this vine via the great evolutionary laboratory.
By changing the timescale, we shall see how the forest creates
new species of passion vine.
In the forest, the passion vine has a single enemy,
the Heliooonius butter?y caterpillars
that have devoured its leaves for generations.
One day, during a mutation,
a passion vine became highly toxic.
Rid of its predators,
this new species of vine began to prosper.
Until a new species of caterpillar appeared,
immune to the vine's poison.
The butter?y became toxic for its predators.
In all impunity, this new Heliooonius
started devastating passion vines.
Other species of vine then appeared
changing the shape of their leaves to fool the butter?ies.
The trick worked perfectly
until the butter?y found a ?ower whose pollen was so rich
it was able to live much longer,
long enough to learn to recognise the passion wine's disguised leaves.
A new passion vine appeared.
It produced fake eggs
to make the butter?y believe the place was already occupied.
I'll stop there but, in this game of to and fro,
45 species of Heliooonius butter?ies
and 150 species of passion vines
appeared in just a few decades.
And there are millions of species
that come to life in the same way.
These countless individual stories
contribute to the history of the forest.
The yearS P955-
The secondary forest continues to grow.
Its trees are now around 130 feet tall.
From the ground up,
they offer a host of dwellings
to countless creatures seeking new areas to oolonise.
Deforestation made many species ?ee.
They return over time.
The leaf eater
attracts the ?esh eater.
The food chain gradually forms anew.
Some new arrivals play a key role in the foresfs rebirth.
From distant lands,
they bring the seeds of trees that didn't survive destruction.
Through such twists of fate,
the forest recovers some of its gems
like the moabi, the most beautiful of the great tropical trees.
This seed contains the promise of a 220-foot giant.
The first seconds
of a creature that will live more than 1,000 years.
The secondary foreslfs renewal occurs through spectacular phenomena
but also countless tiny events,
repeated millions of times.
The ?ourishing of the tall trees' tops
sets the rhythm for the plants and animals living below.
Wherever there's a patch of light,
there's a leaf to catch it.
And wherever there's a leaf, there's someone to covet it.
If we were to weigh the foresfs animals,
the ants in their entirety
would outdo the combined weight of all the other animals.
They work on every level.
Tiny transporters, they carry huge amounts
of leaves and soil between the upper and lower forest.
As gardeners, they grow plants in the treetops
to make their nests.
As farmers,
they gather the honeydew produced by stinging insects
that feed on the trees' sap.
Termites impress me.
All day long, they decompose huge amounts of dead wood.
They stubbornly carry soil to the sky
to build their fortress high above the ground.
From the infinitely small to the infinitely large,
the canvas uniting all living beings is slowly woven.
This canvas, as yet incomplete, is already dense enough
to heighten the tension between hunter and hunted,
for nests and dwellings to become rare,
for the weak to migrate to escape the strong.
The forest now has two faces,
one by day and one by night.
More than anything, I love dawn in the forest.
This fragile moment when the song of the day's animals
blends with the cries of the night creatures.
How many of them are hidden in the trees?
The trees
communicate in secret.
Not with sounds but scents.
Stringing scents together as we do words,
they send their messages over long dislnnoes.
Seducing, attracting.
Rejecting or enchanting,
their influence is considerable.
Like all living beings.
Trees need a mate in order to reproduce,
or to pass on their pollen at least.
That's why ?owers are born.
They charm the animal with their shape, colour and scent.
By hiding a little nectar at their heart, they invite it
to roll in their pollen.
Then the animal moves on to other ?owers
carrying further and further the precious load
entrusted to it by the plant.
The technique is perfect.
The tree in bloom carries out, remotely and discreetly,
something that causes so much toil and energy for animals,
the act of mating.
Trees do not burden themselves with useless things.
Flowers give way to ywna fruit
that will grow in secret.
When they're attacked, trees sound the alarm.
They release odorous signals that elicit an instant reaction
from their neighbours.
Their leaves then become toxic, bitter er repulsive.
All the predator can do is go elsewhere to eat.
We find the secondary forest trees three centuries later.
They have become giants.
They new fight each other for a place in the sun.
Putting a neighbour in the shade kills it
and makes it vanish.
Some trees even engage in a bodily struggle.
The strangler fig seed arrives via the air.
While the other trees, year after year,
grew patiently in the dim light of the woods,
this seed overtakes everyone.
It sprouts on high branches, making the most of the sun's energy.
On sprouting, the young tree sends its roots to the ground.
Roots?
Genuine lassos that immediately weld together
as soon as they touch.
The struggle will last several decades.
The tree slowly wastes away.
Down in the undergrowth,
profiteers try to seize its dead leaves
before they touch the ground.
For me, the basket palm
is the most spectacular of them.
Ittrapsallitcantocarryittoilsrools
where the deoomposers help it to produce ils own humus.
So many creatures live in the undergrowth now
that every scrap, every particle
is a meal opportunity fought over in countless ways.
The struggle comes to an end.
The strangler fig has dew-toured its victim.
Taking its place in the forest,
I't has cannibalised its wood to make its own branches.
It has taken its shape.
All that remains of the vanquished is a gaping void
in the middle of the vanquishefs huge trunk.
Over time, the foresfs ceiling closes.
On the ground, the low plants have vanished through lack of light.
This open undergrowth indicates a mature forest.
Asia! as the eye can see,
it's hard to find two trees of the same family.
This is not an accident.
Living motionless on the same spot for centuries
means accepting the impossibility of ?eeing predators' attacks,
disease and parasites that accumulate overtime.
The adult tree can bear all that without too much harm
butifilsseedsfallatilsfeet.
They are irretrievably condemned.
The tree's only solution
is to scatter them as far as possible.
Minute vibrations spread
through the ground for miles,
to the feet of a hungry, waiting animal.
How ironic...
The trees feed the forest creatures
for one good reason:
to transport their seeds.
The fruit is merely the bait in this ruse.
The trees even fill their fruit with sugar
and delicious aromas.
They're irresistible.
The trick works.
The future tree is carried off in a huge stomach
carried by stronq MS
and a brain always seeking to travel.
Some trees even make
the ?esh stick to the fruit's stone.
The glutlon will suck it at length
before finally spitting it out.
Thus the seed travels even further.
It amuses me to think that each forest tree
travelled part of the way with an animal.
How did it end up here?
During a hunt or a nap?
Time is so different for trees.
Animal life must seem so brief to them.
The animal rules over space, the tree overtime.
Trees are in fact great travellers.
They use all the mobile forces of the natural world.
By water, on wings, on foot, on the wind,
they can spread to every continent.
I even know of trees that can cross the oceans.
The forest is luxuriant again.
But it depends a great deal on the daily tropical rain showers.
If there are just a few days without rain,
the leaves begin to wither.
Particularly those of plants living on branches
or trunks, far from the ground.
They have no way to stock water.
In the heat,
the forest is rich with scents.
This time, they rise to the sky.
The trees call for rain.
The scent molecules trap water vapour
hanging in the air.
This suffices to form clouds.
It's as if the trees
kept the rain above their heads
to refresh themselves at will.
Back in the primary forest,
exceptional trees bloom.
They have trunks worthy of the centuries that they have seen.
700 years n90.
This giant was a tiny seed.
Trees embody time.
The forces at work within such trees
are considerable.
The roots draw water,
vessels carry it upwards to 220 feet above the ground.
The leaves turn it into sap
that returns to the branches and roots.
A tree lives through this ?ow.
When 'n can no hanger rake water to 'its top,
it stops growing.
That's the only limit to its ascent.
The moabi is new an emergent tree,
one of those that dominate the forest ocean
for over a thousand years.
The canopy.
The active surface of the primary forest,
where life abounds like nowhere else on earth.
Here, the forest touches the sky.
Here, thousands of individuals sprout, grow
and breathe at the same time.
Atthe end ofils life, atreeisaworldofitsown,
like an island.
It's the home for hundreds of plant species,
occupied in turn by hundreds of animal species,
also inhabited by smaller creatures.
On inking a closer look,
we discover that these tinier worlds
are infinitely small.
The accumulation of these creatures
becomes a burden that endangers the tree's balance.
This giant that defied gravity for centuries is going to surrender.
The death of great trees
is the perfect sign of the forests maturity.
It reshuf?es the cards by rutuming to the ground
the huge quantity of matter represented by the fallen tree.
It also brings light to the undergrowth
that hadn't seen any for centuries.
A tree that falls is a genuine revolution.
When it happens.
The world of the canopy meets that of the undergrowth.
Despite living in the same place,
they had never met before.
The seeds of pioneers were waiting in the shade.
They instantly launch the healing process.
A new cycle begins.
I've spent so many years in forests.
A whole human lifetime.
Thinking in tree time makes my head spin.
What does the world look like when you live so long?
I've worked a lot, I've learned a lot
but I've merely touched on this world's mysteries.
Here, I sense the power of life's forces,
their creativity, their whims.
Something that goes beyond me but whose grandeur I appreciate.
I cannot accept the disappearance of this world.
My story is at its end.
I hear the murmur of primitive peoples fading in the undergrowth,
carrying off the memory of man who came from the forest.
In the past, we lived in peace with the trees.
Our ancestors looked on them as respectable and benevolent gods.
Today, we are victims of our own might.
Let us look at trees.
In their motionless serenity,
lie the roots of what was our birthplace
and our wisdom.