1999
A poignant cry from someone who was forced to leave behind the Nature, by civilization... "When God created the world, He filled it with rocks, Acacia trees and people. He gave the Bedouin a Camel to transport him back and forth. And told him that water would be a precious gift. He did not make men to go into the Sea, but to behold and admire its greatness." Ahmed, the Bedouin, lives in the shores of the Red Sea. Only seldom does he cross the desert. The Bedouins have become taxi drivers and their Camels have now four wheels. They carry the tourists near to the water. Many are divers. They ask him if he wants to dive with them. But he is Ahmed, the Bedouin. And the land is his world.
1999
The Portuguese Admiral Vasco da Gama discovered the Islands of Seychelles to Europe in 1498, while returning from one of its voyages of exploring the sea route to India. They were named "The Seven Sisters". The coral reef that surrounded the islands made them useless for good porting, so the Portuguese sailors left them alone.
1999
Jenny, a young Divemaster, lives proudly on the Bonaire where she was borne. Her family arrived to the island several centuries ago, brought by a Portuguese slave ship. They remained there even after the Dutch Crown liberated all the slaves, and resisting from the exodus of the 50'. "I am a fruit of successive crossings", she says laughing and showing her beautiful dark hands. "My Grandfather still worked in this salt lagoons.
1999
Part 2: THE FUTURE These are our seven seas, which still survive in the end of this second millennium. In Portugal, the underwater marine life is not so exuberant as the one of the other places we saw in the series. But our sea, in spite of the multiple aggression's, still holds some unique treasures and almost intact ecosystems. Unfortunately and uncompreenssively this apparent paradise is in endangered. Brutally endangered by the industrial development of the last decades. The waste doesn't destroy only the surface of the planet and the coastal areas. For the misfortune of the underwater ecosystems, the waste created by the human activity is dumped everywhere. And if we don't invert this tendency, if we don't stop destroying Nature, this will be the future. In one generation we will no longer be able to see animals in their wild state and they will be confined to a world of concrete walls, air-conditioned and electric light. This was the message we were clearly left with at the last World Exposition of the XX century: a heritage for the future, of concrete, plastic and silicon...