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NATURE CALLS. Cuatro Ciénegas.
My daughter used to swim here. Where we're standing.
All of this was a lagoon, 2 kilometers wide,
and in Google Earth you can see how it was drying,
and the water spot was becoming increasingly small.
In '99 I was in my laboratory
when a person paid by NASA arrived,
to convince us that Cuatro Ciénegas
is a place we had to study.
Why was NASA interested in this?
Because it's a wonderful place
that reminds us of the primitive planet
and because it's the most similar to Mars.
Especially the sand that we see here.
And the idea of a place without food,
was that we would find very little genetic diversity.
Why? Because it's a very rough place where to live.
But we found enormous diversity.
So I had to get rid of everything I knew,
re-learn ecology, understand the geology,
understand how the water moves.
And at the same time that we discovered the sea,
we discovered that that sea was going to die
because they started to extract the water
in Valle del Hundido, right next from here.
The problem is that the water has no owner.
The water legislation is something extremely confusing,
it's a federal good, is a national good,
and therefore, since it's vague, no one takes care of it.
The driest places in Mexico are
of something that's called "Free Birth".
Which means that anyone can take out as much water
as they want and no one can stop that.
We haven't noticed that we're killing the deep aquifers
and that that water is not going to come back.
They didn't explain correctly the water cycle.
The water cycle here, depends on that is damp,
and that moisture goes back to the depths and come out again.
These colored creatures that we see here
in a puddle that no one would pay more than 2 pesos for it,
have survived for billions of years.
Cataclysms that killed the dinosaurs,
cataclysms that killed 80% of marine life,
global freezing of the planet twice.
And these have survived everything.
And the 20th century human
decided that he doesn't care the desert and that we must use
the deep water to irrigate crops
that have no place here like alfalfa.
And in only 10 years that I have been working here,
I have seen a lot of these ecosystems die.
Because of the greed and people's stupidity,
that insist not to understand
that the water used for irrigation,
is very old water and that it is necessary
to support the whole ecosystem.
The creatures from here, and only the ones from here,
are direct descendants from the ones that changed
the planet forever during the Precambrian era.
Here we have the direct descendants of the engineers
that made this, a habitable planet.
Here, all the elements that give us life are recycled here,
and now we need the whole planet for it to do the same as these.
This black part is the initial world, when the comet soup ended.
The first autotrophic metabolism, that is to say,
that could live without sugar,
is this black one, that are the methanogenic.
The methanogenic only need CO2 from the primitive atmosphere,
that was very abundant
and hydrogen from the rocks.
Then there's the brown layer that ate sulfur from the magma
and could reduce it, because it was a very reductive environment.
And then we see a mixture in between dark green
and purple that are the sulfur bacteria,
both purple sulfur bacteria and green sulfur bacteria.
Those are the oldest bacteria
that managed to domesticate the sun.
The energy of the sun and turn it into sugar.
And on top there are the first cyanobacteria,
that we can see in a small green layer,
and then there's the salt.
We have been working very hard for 10 years making science
and those same 10 years making environmental politics
to be able to convince all government levels
that this extraordinary place is a treasure
that has to be kept for the sake of humanity.
We're working to link science with society.
Socially what we're doing is working with children
from kindergarten to 6th grade
in an environmental education program
and with the kids from highschool teaching them
how to make scientific questions
and teaching them how to make them to get an answer.
And we're going to set up a high technology laboratory,
so that they can do the same we do,
make questions, extract DNA and then answer to them.
This valley is part of the Ramsar Convention, that is to say,
according to international laws the wetland has to be protected.
It's also a UNESCO treasure.
It's a very important site for conservation
for World Wildlife and for Nature Conservancy
and for all the agencies dedicated to conservation.
And in spite of that the law is yet not protecting the water.
And all of this diversity depends on water.
I decided to fight for Cuatro Ciénegas
basically for a conscience struggle and a fight
for personal coherence and towards my children.
What is being lost here is not only the only window to our past,
but a possibility of a better future.
Cuatro Ciénegas is the only time machine we know of.
That can take us to the primitive planet
and to a sustainable future.