- Documentaries Heirs of Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, at risk of extinction
Odile Rodríguez de la Fuente (Madrid, 1973) has nothing against the nickname "Félix, the friend of animals" with which his father went down in history. At the end of the day, it is a "loving" denomination that brings children closer, which serves to remember him as "a friendly, popular and adventurous character". But that falls terribly short to describe the greatest naturalist in our history, who was also a communicator, anthropologist, philosopher, visionary, agitator of consciences.
His death in a plane crash, when he was traveling by plane through Alaska to shoot his documentaries , caused a national mourning and left a terrible feeling of orphanhood in young and old. After 40 years, his voice resonates as if he were alive, his figure grows and his legacy continues to grow, condensed now in Felix, a man on earth (GeoPlaneta), the book dedicated to him by the youngest of his three daughters .
"I have wanted to rediscover the authentic Felix" , confesses Odile Rodríguez de la Fuente, who was seven years old when the tragedy occurred and decided to follow in his footsteps studying biology and cinema. "I think this book exudes how extraordinary he was, beyond his work as a naturalist and scientific disseminator. Felix was also a thinker, a humanist who raised our cultural level ."
"And he did it driven by his passion and his need to share with us his amazement and his love for the natural world," adds Odile. "Felix caused a collective awakening, a reconnection with nature, and with our atavistic nature. He wanted to empower us, provide us with tools to develop our own criteria and sense of fulfillment. He was like a shaman or a Socratic philosopher, with a holistic and interconnected vision of life and of the human being ".
Felix, a man on earth is like the most intimate and definitive 375-page field notebook of the "friend of the human being", with illustrations that return to us that incomparable sense of adventure that summoned us as children before the television when we listened to music from Man and Earth . One also has the feeling of listening to Felix on every page, with those hypnotic programs from The Adventure of Life on the radio. Or of greedily flipping through the dazzling pages of the Salvat Encyclopedia of Fauna (18 million volumes sold).
'A child with adult skin'
All of Felix's wisdom is concentrated in this throbbing tribute to his daughter, who reminds him of "a child with adult skin" and who invites us to travel to his origins in Poza de la Sal (Burgos) to understand everything. There he enjoyed the future doctor (rather than naturalist) of almost total freedom to explore his environment until he was ten years old, when he finally had to go through the rigor of school.
" Blissful country childhood , amazed every day at the secrets of life," wrote Felix. "Blissful ancient, telluric curiosity, which quenches your thirst directly at the sources of the earth and links man, through strong and deep roots, to the nature of which he is a synthesis and a mirror".
" My father feared that the human being would increasingly denature himself and end up neurotic and lost in the labyrinth of his own mind," recalls Odile. "Most of the children grow up today in cities with hardly any contact with nature and are" domesticated "each time before in schools. We are forging a future society that is denatured, empty and very lost, which makes us very vulnerable and without the necessary strength to face the challenges that hang over us. "
The book puts Felix not only in his geographical surroundings in the heart of Castile, where he could hear the howling of the wolf under the full moon, but also its historical and hostile context, in late Francoist Spain in black and white.
"We were in the last years of the dictatorship," recalls Odile, "in the midst of developmentalism that encouraged people to leave towns and migrate to cities, in a country where there was a Board for the Extinction of Harmful Animals."
And yet, Felix had the virtue of not causing hatred or rancor with a radical vision for those times, with his message of "no aggression" against nature. "He was always a vitalist who saw the glass half full and who faced challenges as stimuli to bring out the best in themselves. Perhaps he thought that we were so confused and distracted that we would have to hit rock bottom to realize that the only important thing is LIFE "
Felix as an almost precursor to James Lovelock's Gaia theory , which considers Earth as a living, complex and self-regulating system. Felix as promoter of the environmental movement, recognized teacher for a whole generation. Felix as an implacable defender of the rural world as "man's bond with nature" (a task that Odile herself continued with the Foundation that bore her father's name). Felix as a pioneer of organic agriculture and "total recycling", to reincorporate what we call "garbage" into the terrestrial environment.
More than offering us his legacy, Odile vindicates the rabid news of his father in these critical moments . And he dismisses him, reminding him with his hawks, always expecting "the optimal physical and mental state" that the falconry experts define as "yarak" ... "Felix was a man who took the flight of his life in yara k, connected with himself and enjoying his life journey to the fullest (...) He encouraged us to break our moorings with fear and enter life with an open heart and soul, to feel part of something much greater and powerful that houses us and awaits us with infinity generosity".
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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