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You really need to be immersed in the Amazon to seek solutions
solutions for the problems there are there.
What drives the work? It is a great passion for water,
a great passion for fish, and the will to understand
how something that complex works. This is the major challenge.
Here at the department alone we have about seventy researchers dedicated solely
solely to developing technologies for the environmental area.
The technology of building sensors sensors for the Amazon is... as unique
unique as the Amazon itself. If you try to approach this issue
with off-the-shelf solutions, you will fail.
The same goes for the process of building sensors for the Amazon;
as soon as a sensor was built for erosion,
on the first day it was eaten up by the ants.
You first undertake a wide-ranging survey of the area.
You can do this using methods
or areal or satellite photographs.
And then you plan your campaigns, which often involve dozens of people
who will characterize different environments:
water, sediments, each type of vegetation, each type of fauna.
And then you consolidate it all all in a single database
you can access in several manners.
The closest thing for the public at large would be Google Earth, like this.
This is the database we later use to develop the technologies
that will preserve this ecosystem.
So, if you understand this, this... this flow, the information that is in this data flow,
you can even understand the aspirations of nature
and establish dialogue with it through your projects.
Your project, a gas pipeline, it must dialogue with nature;
it must reach consensual solutions with nature, you know?
So you can have a sustainable insertion there, you know?
And in nature we also include the riverside populations.
In fact, the Amazon was always a dream, you know? A childhood thing!
And when I arrived... in Urucu, specifically,
which is a grandiose thing, you are impressed by the size of everything there
and you realize how meaningless you are in the midst of all of that.
There are communities along our route of... river distribution
of oil, which were selected as those which might be impacted
might be impacted the most in the event of an oil spill.
So you will get to know each household there before a possible accident happens,
in order for that to work as our paradigm in the recovery work
done for... some ecosystem that might be impacted.
When you work in the Amazon region, you have thousands of questions
you do not have answers for.
You often work there for a long time
and still don't have the answers. This is a great challenge.
We continue in pursuit of these answers to understand how it works.
It is like that childhood thing of taking a clock apart to see how it works.
So you can't just look at it without understanding how it works
to try the best way to... improve or to... better this operation,
and that is when you relate those things to the application of your work.
So we do the work of mapping all of the biological communities
there are in the region and you select them like this: "This one is very sensitive,
we will follow-up on this one because if it is protected,
that means we are doing good work there."
When you arrive there and look at the size of it, its immensity,
that amount of water, that amount of green,
you dive into it and you start to... believe you are only
a very small piece of that universe, but you are capable of somehow
answering a few things that are major questions for humanity.
I think that helps a lot. Of course it helps. It is our great motivation.
Furthermore, it is beautiful.