Original subtitles

This bizarre world, with its many hairs,

is in appearance very similar to a forest of baobabs.

Pores seem to open like hungry little mouths.

As strange as it may seem,

this invisible nature is quite familiar to you.

This is the surface of a leaf,

magnified hundreds of times using

the latest developments in electron microscopy.

A technical feat achieved for the first time.

Here, sap progresses in the veins of a leaf.

An ejection of seeds is slowed down 2000 times,

because plants are anything but motionless.

Plants have conquered all environments,

volcanic lands, dry deserts, estuaries,

ice and snow,

and even the asphalt of our cities.

Deprived of legs, they have invented

various forms of sexuality in order to conquer the world.

Their strategies have enabled them to take root

in the most extreme places on the planet.

This is probably what our world looked like

460 million years ago,

when the first land plants appeared.

A land covered with pools of acid hot springs,

with temperatures rising to 90 degrees Celsius.

Despite such heat, some plants can grow.

Around almost every hot spring, you'll find

grasses of varying types growing up against the hot water.

The high temperature water cools off very rapidly

such that these plants can grow in these environments.

But there are some plants that are very, very interesting.

One known as its scientific name is Dichanthelium,

but its more generic name is Hot Springs Panic Grass.

Looks like weeds in my front yard,

but it's this grass right there

with the purple edges to the grass leaves.

This particular plant has a fungus growing

associated with its roots,

and researchers at Montana State University

have shown that this fungus relationship with this plant

is what allows this plant to grow

at these higher temperatures

and tolerate high temperatures.

The mechanism is not yet known,

but somehow, this fungus is imparting

some protective measure or causing the plant

to react some way that allows it to protect itself

from these higher temperatures.

Next to the acid hot springs,

plant roots grow on the surface

to optimize the capture of oxygen.

They have also developed the capacity

to withstand the heavy metals present

in these hostile environments.

Plants get their energy from the sun.

Scientists call this photosynthesis.

Algae are the first plants

that appeared at the beginning of life on Earth.

Unable to leave their aquatic environment,

they are already masters of photosynthesis.

When the temperature drops,

algae produce colored substances and sugars

that act as an antifreeze.

Some algae will even accept to be swallowed

by gelatinous organisms, whose envelope

will protect them from extreme cold.

During the brief summer season of Spitsbergen,

an archipelago near Greenland, the sun never sets.

It shines 24 hours a day,

an ideal season to study the growing vegetation.

The Earth's crust will thaw in summer

but remains low in minerals.

This severely limits the rate of growth

and density of the vegetation.

Wherever there's a form of shelter,

where seeds accumulate, where sediments accumulate,

we immediately have vegetation that settles in.

Here's a typical and pretty area of Drias

that is growing.

The plants, once rooted, will try to gain ground.

We can see it here, for example.

So basically, the goal is to hang on,

then gain inches, bit by bit.

Just how do these plants colonize

such cold, bare lands?

To succeed, they group together,

which enables them to store what little heat is available,

an efficient way of conquering the surroundings.

Some of the plants that live here are over 100 years old.

There are two explanations for this.

The first is being able to resist

the wind and cold temperatures.

And they do this by growing in clusters.

The second is the plants' compost.

Plants that die leave their own fertilizer,

their own organic matter, for those who come after.

The generations of plants

that die on this spot here form fresh Earth on the surface.

The grouping of plants serves

as a breeding ground for other plants,

such as the hairy lousewort.

The plant is well acclimatized.

It produces a hairy, feathery lining

to protect it against the cold.

The lining is so tight, it acts as insulation

and plays an important role

in the screening of harmful sun rays.

The edelweiss uses the same technique.

Its flowers are protected by a duvet,

a strategy used by many plants

to avoid being naked in the cold.

This technique is also used to protect plants from heat,

like this cactus.

Microscopic hairs allow plants to retain water

necessary for their survival.

Some of them are shaped like anchors

for catching droplets.

Each form of hair is perfectly adapted

to a particular environment.

The most developed and most dense vegetation

is located in an even more extreme environment,

steep, sharp cliffs.

Oh, look over there. Can you see?

Between the zones of scree,

where rocks have fallen,

at the foot of the pillars there.

You have an area covered in green.

Let's go and take a look.

We're going over to the steep area.

We don't really know what type of terrain we'll meet,

probably very unstable.

There are zones of really high erosion.

It's a very steep slope there.

It's very unstable.

To study biodiversity,

you really need to reach the ecosystem,

and some are not easy to get to.

But that can also be the reward,

taking risks to get to places

that nobody has observed.

This whole area is an extreme within an extreme.

Well, this is unexpected, very unexpected.

Here we have plants that are in fruit,

or even in flower.

How do these plants find organic matter

in such an inhospitable environment?

Finding plants at a more developed stage

here, hanging on a cliff at 100 meters of altitude,

is really surprising.

At the same time, it's not a mystery.

We're just below a bird colony,

so basically their food falls from the sky.

Here we have guano that brings nitrogen,

the nutrient material which also allows

a whole host of bacteria, plants, mosses and lichens

to colonize this environment.

Lichens are a combination

of algae and fungi that fragment in order to multiply.

It may take them 50 years to cover one square centimeter.

Within the lichen, the fungus filaments capture water

and minerals and provide protection for the algae.

The algae captures light for photosynthesis

and brings energy to the fungus.

Symbiosis is their force.

Other plants have invented more radical solutions

in order to survive in nutrient poor environments.

Venus Flytraps naturally live

on the border of North and South Carolina

in the Southeast part of the United States.

This is the only place in the world

that they are naturally found.

It's an area of about 20 square miles

or about 40 square kilometers.

Why aren't all plants carnivorous?

The answer is both simple and complicated.

On the simple side, first off, really we can say

that all plants really are carnivorous,

because all plants get minerals and nutrients

through their roots.

And those minerals and nutrients are basically made up

of dead animals that have rotted and decomposed in the soil,

and the plants are sucking those up.

But the kinds of carnivorous plants that we see

where the leaves have actually changed shape to make traps,

this is very different.

And this is an accident of evolution

that probably happened about 50 million years ago.

It actually happened about six times

among the entire plant kingdom.

And some plants, those plants growing in

very nutrient poor conditions,

evolved a particular mutation to allow them

to capture insects and extract the minerals and nutrients

directly from the insects.

How do these plants catch insects?

How do they move so fast without having muscles and nerves?

The Venus Flytrap is taking the energy

that's stored in water, pumping it out very quickly

to close the trap and then re-pumping that water

back in to reset the trap.

It's at the hinge of the trap

that cells fill with water,

causing the closure of the lobes.

These tiny hairs trigger the trap.

When prey successfully touches two sensory hairs

within 20 seconds, it activates the death trap

that immediately closes.

For the plant, the advantage is obvious.

A small twig will not action the trap for nothing.

Only the agitation of an insect is likely

to trigger a second hair.

The sensitivity of the hairs is so finely adjusted

that the fall of raindrops will not trigger the trap.

How does the plant manage to each such large prey?

Carnivorous plants are not only mouths,

but also stomachs.

They use these multiple red enzymes

to reduce their prey to a pulp.

The plant secretes enzymes, just like people

have digestive enzymes in their stomachs

that dissolve the insect.

And then the plant just absorbs all the nutrients

in the juices that were left

from the dissolved insect.

Carnivorous plants only digest

the soft flesh of their prey.

All that remains is the insect's exoskeleton.

It takes a Venus flytrap about three to five days

to completely digest an ant or a fly that it has caught.

The Venus flytrap will only dine

three or four times in its life

before turning black and wilting.

Most carnivorous plants live in swamps,

happily obliging Aaron Ellison

to use his homemade kayak to approach them.

Sundews, or plants a lot like sundews,

are probably the most primative or ancient type

of carnivorous plant.

This sort of pattern of a sticky trap,

then a more complicated trap having evolved

has occurred at least five or six times

in all of the plant kingdom.

Sundews are the primitive group,

followed next in their evolutionary sequence

by the Asian pitcher plants,

and followed next in the evolutionary sequence

by Venus flytraps.

It may be primitive,

but this glue trap is highly efficient.

Each ball glows in the sun like a dewdrop

and acts as a magnet to attract insects.

It contains a powerful sticky glue.

Any insect that lands is stuck with no chance of escape.

The efforts of this fly to escape its trap are in vain.

Once immobilized, it will be dissolved

by round enzymes along the stem.

Pitcher plants are considered advanced

as carnivorous plants go, because they have

a variety of methods that they use

to both attract and trap and digest insects.

The pitcher plant has these hairs

that point downward so that when the insect

tries to crawl back up, it gets caught

in these hairs and falls further into the plant.

The inside of the pitcher is coated

with a very, very fine wax

that allows the pitcher plants to act

like a sliding board for the insects

to slide down into the very bottom

where they're captured and digested.

The electron microscope

reveals this amazing forest of hair,

all pointing in the same direction,

stopping any prey from climbing out.

Other species have replaced hairs by small tiles,

in which insects' legs become trapped.

Some hairs are even equipped with glue on their tip.

Carnivorous plants have evolved to adapt

according to varying sizes and types of prey.

There are over 500 varieties of carnivorous plants

that live in swamps.

But some are not where you'd expect them to be.

Faster than a Venus flytrap,

more powerful than the best mousetrap,

it's the bladderwort.

And if you pull it up, it looks just like any other

green, limp algae that you would find

in the pond anywhere.

But put this under a microscope,

and a whole new world of plant life

will become visible.

These carnivorous plants

capture zooplankton using a bag-shaped trap.

Equipped with a valve that closes at a speed

of 10 to 15 milliseconds.

But unlike above surface carnivores,

they do not have digestive glands.

How do they digest living prey?

Bladderworts have made a pact with smaller than them,

tiny protazoas.

It doesn't take long for an army of them

to decompose the prey.

The bladderwort enables the protozoa

to feed on large prey that they would be

unable to catch alone.

And the protozoa break down

essential digestive nutrients for the bladderwort.

It's microscopic symbiosis.

Once fed, the plant can now grow this magnificent flower.

Plants use energy to build structures.

Just like people invest money in businesses,

plants invest carbon in structures.

We expected that a complicated structure

like a carnivorous plant trap,

like the trap of a Venus flytrap,

would take a lot of carbon to build.

To our surprise, the results of our research showed

that for a normal leaf that takes about

a gram and a half of carbon

to make every gram of leaf.

In contrast, these very elaborate, very complicated

carnivorous traps that we had assumed,

we had always assumed were very expensive to produce,

turn out to be really cheap.

On about average, 20 to 25% less expensive,

less energetically costly to make

than are the leaves of a normal plant.

If people were designing a Venus flytrap,

they would come up with a system of pumps and pulleys

and engines that would require a lot of fossil fuels

to drive that, as opposed to thinking about

how they could just simply take the energy stored in water,

squeeze that energy out, and then reuse that energy again

from the water to reset the trap.

And so plants like Venus flytraps have a lot to teach us.

We see a lot of really large carnivorous plants

in science fiction movies.

But carnivorous plants really couldn't grow that big.

Oy, what I did?

All the big plants, the things like trees,

have lots of support structures,

bark, wood, trunks.

Carnivorous plants are herbs.

They don't make wood,

so a really, really large carnivorous plant

would have so large an energetic demand

simply to hold itself up

that there wouldn't be enough left for the traps.

If some carnivorous plants

have turned their leaves into insect traps,

others simply capture water,

another way of adapting to the surrounding environment.

Tillandsia grows mainly in treetops

and lives on raindrops, the secret of its survival.

Water is trapped in tiny cups,

which line the walls of the plant.

They act like buckets.

This rootless plant can absorb and retain water

required for growth.

Splashing from leaf to leaf,

the water droplets deliver rare minerals

the plant needs for growth.

Unlike Tillandsia, the hypersensitive leaves

of mimosa pudica will close to protect against

weather or herbivorous predators.

A single drop of water can trigger this movement.

The closure is caused by little red balls

that inflate like tiny airbags

when the leaf feels a contact.

Plant leaves are covered with a network of veins.

They have as many different ramification patterns

as there are fingerprints in humans.

Eleni Katifori is a leaf specialist.

What we want to understand is

whether the environment or the particular conditions

have an effect on the architecture of the venation,

because we see a variety of plants in the desert

or in the Arctic, or in wet or dry conditions,

and we see a variety of architectures.

We want to understand if there is any correlation

between the environment, where the plant lives

and the architecture of the venation.

This tree, in the heart of

New York's Central Park, is a ginkgo.

It is amongst the oldest species on Earth.

In revolutionary ancient times,

most plants were like ginkgo, very primitive.

Today, most of the plants you're going to see

have very complex venation, very sophisticated.

And the reason for this is that ginkgos,

which used to cover a very big part of the planet,

were out competed by the more sophisticated plants

that can do photosynthesis more efficiently.

To study the evolution of its veins,

Eleni damages the ginkgo leaf

by piercing a hole in its center.

Using ultraviolet light and optical filters,

Eleni has developed a method.

This liquid is a marker, and by absorbing it,

the leaf will gradually reveal its structure.

Ginkgo has a very primitive vein network.

It has no loops.

When we create an injury, when we punch a hole,

the water cannot bypass the injury site,

and that part of the leaf will die.

Modern plants have evolved loops.

And with the help of loops, water can bypass

any injury site and eventually fill up the whole leaf.

And this is the secret for survival for modern plants

when there is damage.

This modern network of veins

enables plants to adapt to all conditions

with very low energy expenditure.

Leaves and leaf venation might still be evolving.

We don't know.

Plants are still competing with each other,

and maybe in hundreds of millions of years

they will have different and maybe more efficient

patterns of leaf veins.

The bodies of plants have evolved

through evolution.

Without legs, they have succeeded

in colonizing all environments

through inventive sexuality.

Plants have three ways of reproducing,

sexless by auto producing young plants,

self-fertilization, by sex between

their own male and female organs,

remote sex, with pollen, an extraordinary invention

that enables them to reproduce without ever

meeting a companion.

The sperm is protected within a simple capsule

that will enable them to travel

from flower to flower with the help

of an insect, a bird or a mammal pollinator.

If you cannot deliver your own pollen,

you have no choice but to trust it to someone else.

The plant provides nectar as a reward.

Pollen grains are quite diverse

to an extent that you can recognize species

based on the morphology of the pollen grain,

very much like the fingerprints for human beings.

So, if you talk about 250,000 species of plants,

there are that many, or almost that many number

of pollen shapes, if you will.

And these maybe can be quite diverse.

It's one of the great mysteries of plant biology,

why they are so diverse.

Some possible explanations would be, in fact,

adaptation to slightly different conditions.

There's an initial prototype or initial

pollen grain morphology that has evolved,

and these has then diversified.

Under extreme conditions,

pollen can survive several days.

It has the power to retain its water content.

But just how do they achieve this?

Doctor Jacques Dumais has found an explanation

by observing the structure of pollen

with a scanning electron microscope.

Pollen is an amazing structure.

It's a small structure that could dehydrate

extremely fast when it's released.

And it's in fact quite a feat, given their size.

Most small cells would shrivel and dry out

within minutes under most conditions.

And what it does to protect itself,

it folds on itself, just like origami,

and becomes sealed and therefore can travel

a great distance without losing water.

Jacques Dumais continues his investigation

of ferns in the large greenhouses located

on the rooftops of Harvard Forest,

an offshoot of the famous Harvard University.

He is particularly interested in sporangia,

the reproductive organs of the fern.

Using a high speed camera to film sporangia,

at 2000 frames per second,

he has discovered their technique of ejection.

The catapult system is really a great inspiration.

In fact, was evolved millions of years before humans

ever thought of the catapult.

It evolved in these ferns to release their spores

and make sure that they can be dispersed

over great distances.

Relying solely on inside forces,

this is also the case of the geranium,

which expulses its seeds over more than one meter,

or wild cucumber, which holds the seed throwing

world record, at almost ten meters.

To optimize seedlings' chances for survival,

seeds need to move away from the parent plant.

Too close, and competition for light and water

could make life difficult for them.

Agrimonia and burdock thistles have invented velcro

to hike a lift on the back of passing animals.

Under the eye of the electron microscope,

we can see that each burdock spike has a hook,

a hook that enables the seed to cling on

to the fur of the animal.

Velcro copies this idea with two bands

that grip to each other.

One side covered with tiny hooks,

the other with small loops.

The seed of erodium has a beak and a tail.

It will screw into the ground

through the movement of its tail,

that wraps or unwraps according to humidity levels.

Drilling mechanisms were invented by plants

a long time ago.

There's quite a diversity of mechanisms that are

out there that some of them have been

rediscovered by humans.

Some of them have yet to be rediscovered.

The dandelion is using a strategy

that guarantees almost certain dispersal.

If you're relying on animals to come by,

or things like that,

you're somewhat dependent on your environment.

Wind is by and large always present,

at least in some amount,

and can bring you to great distances

if it's strong enough.

To colonize the world like the dandelion,

most seeds choose wind,

where they use different tricks

like a parachute or helicopter blades.

This truly is bioengineering.

By dispersing in millions,

seeds in pollen can accomplish vast distances.

To grow and conquer, they must find

new and suitable environments,

including our cities.

They are so good at traveling,

that 55% of all species found in the Northeast

of the USA are present in the heart of New York.

60% of the entire flora of Great Britain

is found in London.

With their ability to infiltrate cracks

and their resistance to aggressions,

plants are colonizing our cities.

Certain invasive plants can come

from far, far away.

Invasive plants do not only rely on wind to travel.

With the explosion of globalization,

they now take airplanes and boats

to reach the continents they would not ordinarily

be able to reach.

The Chinese tree of heaven

and the Japanese knotweed have invaded our cities.

Professor Florence Piola focuses on the

strategies of knotweed to crowd out native plants.

Knotweeds have an extremely

rigorous rhizome that grows very fast,

several meters a year.

And a small fragment of rhizome can relocate

a short distance away, giving a new individual plant.

Knotweeds are also masters of chemical warfare.

They secrete molecules in the soil

that poison other plants.

Weakened by toxins, the native plants

do not grow as fast as they usually would,

and the invasive plant proliferates.

In Europe, the Japanese knotweed plants

arrive with a chemical cocktail

that European plants ignore.

Whereas in Japan, plants that live close to knotweeds

have had time to adapt to this chemical cocktail

and get on well.

Knotweeds proliferate more in our cities

than in their native environment,

as they have no natural enemies.

And they have even allied with other invaders.

The knotweed has a

special relationship with invasive ants

that are not originally from Europe.

We have found these ants drinking the nectar

secreted by the stems,

and we believe that the ants, in turn,

keep the knotweed free of pests.

The knotweed is not the only

undesirable invasive plant.

The list of concrete conquerors is long.

Turkestan goosefoot, South African senison,

Chinese tree of heaven, etc.

Some of them become giants,

as is the case of the negundo maple

and the tree of heaven.

Trees of heaven can reach nearly 30 meters high,

with branches of 160 meters wide.

Perhaps what is most remarkable

is their huge variety of chemical molecules,

including herbicides, insecticides, fungicides,

bactericides and virucides.

These are invasive and harmful plants,

but who isn't seduced by their beauty?

The knotweed has become an ornamental plant.

To achieve their goals,

invasive plants know how to seduce us.

Perhaps all plants manipulate us with their exquisiteness.

Citizens are so lacking in greenery,

that their sheer presence has become vital.

Plants can count on our partnership

to break into our cities.

Armies of green warrior movements

have slowly appeared in a fight

to make cities more vegetal.

They claim the right to a greener city.

Armed with seed grenades and hoes,

they want the concrete to bloom

and billboards and cars to go green, literally.

While many plants thrive well on walls and defy concrete,

plants have not yet won the battle

to live permanently on our asphalt.

But the idea germinates amongst many visionaries.

We started with the Champs-Elysees.

Today we're in Lyon.

Tomorrow we continue in Sao Paulo, New York,

Berlin and other cities.

It's about making this a poetic collage

while being impetuous, which speaks of silence,

of nature and of the rustle of the wind,

all set in urban places, where the noise of cars

is omnipresent.

It's along pavement, squares and in the heart of cities,

in public spaces that no longer belong to the public.

And that's why it touches the soul,

like some kind of a revelation.

Here is the Bellecour Square of Lyon,

the largest pedestrian square in Europe.

The idea here is to have 150 varieties of plants

that evoke biodiversity.

Their race against time

to vegetate the immense square

will last three days and two nights.

Bringing nature into the city,

as we do, is totally absurd.

But it's a dream, a childhood dream,

where you go to bed at night surrounded

by the sound of traffic,

and you wake up in the morning in the fields.

It could be the Champs-Elysees, Bellecour,

Time Square in New York.

The stronger the emotion, the more absurd it is,

the more it feels right.

I think what people like about this

is it's really a very collagic effect.

It's collage, and the idea of collage

is to shock through opposition.

And it's what I believe we've done on the High Line,

where one's reception,

one's experience and reception of nature

in terms of weather, light, seasons, time,

designed nature and undesigned nature.

I think people really like that sense of time.

That's what wild nature, in a sense,

brings to people, a sense of time,

a sense of season,

a sense of new birth and new life in the spring,

and death in the winter.

You don't really get that if you

only think of parks and gardens in a traditional sense.

Today's city dwellers seek out

wild urban nature settings.

They want this comeback of natural vegetation.

They enjoy having their heads in the greens

with their feet on the tarmac.

Even if there's no more room

to create new parks and public gardens,

plants can rely on the imagination

of architects and botonists

to help them conquer the walls and rooftops

of all kinds of buildings.

20 years ago, I imagined working in the city

with green walls and vertical gardens.

It was a way for me to introduce living matter

into the city.

I wanted to push this idea a lot further,

to work with everything living and re-vegetate

the city.

People are unhappy in our cities,

made of concrete and artificial materials.

To find what me miss the most,

we have to take root in the city like plants do,

not a vegetal city that is simply decorative,

but a vegetal city where plants play

a far more important role than a simple aesthetic one.

Plants play an important role in cleaning the air

so we can breathe easy in the city.

Green walls are like mini de-polluting factories

using basic elements, air, water, plants

and earth with bacteria.

Exhaust fumes are captured by plants,

and these pollutants are decomposed

by bacteria that feed on them.

The extraordinary abilities of plants

are their best assets,

and this imposes them on our walls.

The lords of green also inspire Luc Schuiten

for tomorrow's means of transport.

A car can also be directly inspired

by something that has grown from nature.

Here is a knot that looks like growing tree branches

that have spread in the curves

and that form the rigidity of the structure.

I can also draw inspiration from a leaf that curls

and creates a dynamic that is very specific

to everything that nature produces.

If Luc Schuiten's biovegetal vehicles

are not quite ready for tomorrow,

an American engineer is vegetalizing buses in New York.

This is Bus Roots.

The project is proposing to install a green roof

on top of city buses to increase the amount

of green space in the cities.

Green roofs, in general plants, they capture CO2

and provide us with oxygen.

They also capture rainwater.

They insulate the buildings where the plants are.

They also lower the Urban Heat Island Effect.

The plants used by Marco Castro Cosio

are essentially sedums, well known for their

endurance to drought.

They are rarely thirsty.

They store water in their globular leaves.

It was only natural for Marco Castro Cosio

to establish his headquarters in his biobus.

This is some of the buses, what they may look like.

If we look closer, we can see

how they could be attached,

could have the layers of moisture

and drainage on the plants' layer.

This is another version, which would be

like a suspended system.

It's like a hammock, which is similar to what

the biobus has right now.

This is the vines.

This is the lightest weight system.

The plants are growing on the side,

and the vines start covering the roof in the middle.

I would love to see the roofs of every city bus

in New York to be covered with plants.

So it would be nice to be on a bridge

and see all these buses passing by,

and you could recognize them by,

oh, there goes the lavender bus,

or there goes the basil bus.

All plants that grow absorb CO2.

This is totally harmonious with our activities.

Plant matter was the building material

from the beginning.

It's only recently that we thought

we could go further and build with

completely artificial materials.

This is a bamboo house that grew

in just three months.

This is obviously a short period,

and it is an immense advantage over trees.

Bamboo has a total lifetime of 30 years,

which is that of a family, of one generation.

It will be a nice way to inhabit

growing, living structures

and totally adapt it to the lifespan of a generation.

The secrets of bamboo are hidden

beneath its microscopic structure,

in the honeycomb type cells that ensure rigidity.

Inside each cell, spring shaped fibers

make up the backbone of the plant,

giving bamboo such remarkable strength.

Luc Schuiten is looking to the future,

but he has no doubt that plants,

through millions of years of evolution,

have many answers to our problems.

One of his dreams is of a green, vegetal city,

where the lotus plant is used as a key building material,

a plant of great interest to the building industry.

The vision of Luc Schuiten to use lotus

as roof or lotus plants as walls for housing

is extremely fascinating.

Still, you can learn a lot from that,

and that is what the Lotusan can do.

You can have the self-cleaning effect on a well.

The results are highly convincing.

The dirty wall without a Lotusan

will have this effect on water.

The water runs down the wall,

but it takes no dirt with it.

Now, if you do the same with the Lotusan color,

again, there's a lot of dirt,

but only before the rain.

Once the rain droplets go on, they pick up the dirt.

What is the secret of the lotus effect?

To understand, place a leaf sample

in an electron microscope and magnify

several thousand times.

The leaf surface of the lotus

reveals thousands of peaks.

A surface on which water droplets bounce off

without being able to spread.

The lotus, in a self-cleaning process,

seeks to protect itself against microbial colonization.

For Luc Schuiten, reality has already caught up

with Utopia.

He has imagined a city where humans

are not afraid to breathe in deeply,

a sustainable city where humans are nature's friend.

I believe there's a true incentive

to return to the living,

because it's 100% sustainable.

Life is what we are by definition.

The proximity of organisms that grow,

that are alive, is certainly something

that very closely resembles our own lives.