One day in April 2019, the GeoPlaneta publishing house knocked on the door of Odile Rodríguez de la Fuente , biologist, daughter of Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente and, in her own words, “her number one fan”. The publisher wanted Odile to write a book about him, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the plane crash that took the life of one of the best known naturalists and disseminators of nature in our country. At first, Odile rejected the offer because, after all, what else could she tell about a man about whom everything has been written . However, the idea of the book kept spinning in his head. “It didn’t take long for me to realize that there was a void that I had detected myself when I turned to books and biographies about Felix for my own use. There was not a single place that gathered and ordered his philosophy and deepest reflections, giving them absolute prominence. On the other hand, I have also deduced, in the years that I have been dedicated to perpetuating and projecting my father’s legacy, that what people look for, what they turn to, in reality, is not so much interpretations or biographies about him, but to Felix himself ”.
The result of this “enlightenment” is Felix. A man on earth , a book in which the naturalist’s daughter dumps the best reflections of the teacher , “those that show his true dimension, which is more that of the humanist, a thinker, an agitator of consciences and a person who goes a lot beyond the ‘animal friend’ ”.
Odile is not at all bothered by the affectionate nickname with which her father has always been known: “the animal friend”, but she would like to be remembered as a figure beyond someone who taught us to love nature and all the creatures that inhabit it, which is no small thing.
We asked Odile if her father’s reflections are not a bit outdated in this time of social media, viral content, posturing and artificial intelligence. After all, his phrases belong to the 70s, those in which Félix sneaked into Spanish homes with his famous documentary series The man and the earth and spoke to us on the radio from The Adventure of Life . “It is a book that is super necessary right now. We have the challenges that he already spoke about in the seventies, on the table ” . And, that’s right, as if Felix had been able to observe with his particular gaze what would happen in that future that is today, which in the end would end up worrying many of us. His are these reflections, compiled in the book signed by Odile:
“I am deeply convinced that if the new generations do not face the enormous problems of environmental conservation with a new, powerful and passionate philosophy, our world will continue its irremediable race of degradation and agony. Only the love of nature, the passion for life and the certainty that we are part of a total community that goes from the smallest bacteria to man will give us strength to defend the only home we have, a small planet lost in a remote galaxy that we have come to call Earth ”.
“It is ironic that the most glorious creature that populates our world, the one that treasures in its cerebral convolutions the most powerful and successful machine that evolution has produced, is precisely the cause of the threat, of harassment, of the relentless persecution of life, even if such persecution implies his own death ”.
“Ours is the culture of things, of the perishable; from the car, from the refrigerator, from the house in the city and in the country and I don’t know where else. From having in the present everything that is necessary, without thinking about what this can mean for something that we have forgotten: the Earth, Mother Nature. Human pressure is invading everything and our growth rate seems to indicate that the current panorama is only a slight prologue of what the human star will become in a couple of centuries ”.
Wise words ahead of their time , reflections of a man who was a true visionary. As if he were here, between us, raising his deep, mesmerizing voice.
“ We are at a turning point and I think it is very important to rely on the wisdom of people who had a lot of intuition and who knew how to see, before they happened, the things that are happening now. Also because today’s society is a very proprietary society, very short messages, messages that do not have much depth and wealth has been lost a bit. In that sense, my father is a person who expands our vision of the world and who also gives the necessary complexity to our way of understanding enormously complex problems and how to face them . I think it is a super-necessary book today precisely ”.
Do we currently have someone like Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, who is capable of transmitting everything that he transmitted? “My father was a unique character because he combined a whole series of elements that it is very difficult for a single person to put them together. He had an absolutely amazing brainpower. He worshiped oral tradition, improvised everything, never took anything written to the radio, never wrote a script for the Man and the Earth series . He was able to retain a lot of information, scientific data, author references that he read constantly. He was a person of great intellectual stature and impressive communication skills. He was capable of doing what many of us fail to do and that is to seduce, enamor, hypnotize those who listen to him and who, without realizing it, were introducing values, principles and raising their cultural level ”.
March 14 marks the 40th anniversary of the naturalist’s death in a plane crash in Shaktoolik, Alaska. Rodríguez de la Fuente was filming the Iditarod for El hombre y la tierra , the hardest sled dog race that exists. With Felix. A man on earth , Odile pays tribute to her father, who he was and everything he represented for her.
The book is a compilation of the main radio and television interventions by Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, drawings made by him, as well as unpublished material. The final touch is put by the testimonies of personalities from all walks of life, who gloss over his figure: Andreu Buenafuente, Rosa Montero, Jesús Calleja, Juan Luis Arsuaga, among others. Edit Geoplanet.
