Odile Rodríguez de la Fuente: "My father did not make scripts nor did he watch audiences, he spoke from emotion"

Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente was the voice of the wild world for an entire generation. Now his youngest daughter also dedicates her life to explaining the wonders of nature, assuming her father's legacy, but in a very different context, both due to the media environment and the critical situation that natural life is suffering. Odile Rodríguez de la Fuente is a biologist, science communicator, and president of Rewilding Spain. She wrote Félix: un hombre en la tierra, four years ago, when the 40th anniversary of the iconic naturalist's death was reached, and now she publishes Som natura to try to instill in new generations the enthusiasm for nature that she herself inherited from her father.

What was it like growing up with Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente as a father?

— All I have are wonderful memories of him. Ever since I can remember, my father was very popular and very well-loved. I remember very well all the affection and gratitude from people, and the very positive energy that transmits to you. From my father, I remember above all his enthusiasm. It is true that because of his work he was not home very much, but I do not remember his absences so much as the fact that, when he was there, he made up for it completely, because he was the type of adult who had a genuine interest in children. He was interested in the world of children, he asked us many questions, he loved going out with us to the countryside... I remember being with him in nature and it was like being in a Disney movie, because he was just as he appeared in the media.

I was explaining things about animals.

— Absolutely, and above all I remember him as enthusiastic. He was a person who was passionate about life with a capital L in all its expressions. He vibrated with the sunrise; if he saw a partridge, he would start talking about the wonders of the partridge, what a spectacular bird... Details that for any other person might have gone unnoticed. I remember very well how contagious his enthusiasm for living and for life was.

And is that why at five years old you decided to be a biologist?

— I am convinced that my vocation is in part an impregnation of all this, even though my sisters were raised the same way and did not turn out as passionate about nature as I am. But I was already very much into little animals as a child; I was out there all day climbing trees, observing worms and insects; I loved ants and everything I saw. And on top of that, I had a person like my father, who with his enthusiasm reinforced my curious childish vision of wanting to know everything.

Did you have a connection through all of this?

— Yes, I remember connecting a lot with him. His loss, in fact, meant a deep sense of orphanhood not only because of the loss of a father, but because of the loss of an accomplice, of a person who truly understood me. And I have seen this in many children of that time—Félix's children, I call them—who felt that my father connected with them. That is why he was so successful with children. Sometimes I say he was a kind of Peter Pan, because he had not completely left his childhood behind, he was a very curious person. And his way of expressing himself really engaged children because it was authentic.

You are talking about the light aircraft accident in Alaska where he died in 1980, when you were only seven years old. How did you experience it at home?

— The truth is that now, as an adult, I realize that if my father was a force of nature, my mother is another one. Because of the capacity she had to deal with such a situation with three young daughters, and above all because she spoke about my father continuously. He continued to be very present at home, but my mother knew how to take on both the masculine and feminine roles and face any difficulty.

You studied biology and cinema, and you joined National Geographic. What was it like working there?

— I consider myself very fortunate for the opportunity my mother gave me to study abroad: I studied both degrees in Los Angeles and went with a scholarship to National Geographic Television. The scholarship was for three months, but I asked to stay for a whole year and for them to let me move between departments to learn how the company worked. And Americans, if you are a person with a lot of enthusiasm, if you are prepared and have conviction, they let themselves be convinced. They allowed me to stay for a whole year and then I stayed for three more years and a bit, already working. It was very positive, because you learn from the best, but at the same time it served to bring them down a bit from their pedestal, because you see the reality. One of the things that disappointed me is that everything is very studied according to formulas they consider will work. They watch the ratings a lot. And I had my father as a reference, who was the exact opposite: it was creativity in power and anti-formula. He didn't even write scripts; when it had already been filmed, he would do the voice-over on the fly over the images, in a totally improvised and spontaneous way.

And I didn't watch ratings.

— Exactly. He let himself be carried away a lot by sensations, by emotions. And of course, I thought that was how it worked, but at National Geographic everything was very measured. I also understand it: when you are so big and you have so many people working for you, you have to ensure that it works.

In fact, your father had been criticized for staging prepared scenes, but NG does it too.

— Totally. It was one of the best reality lessons. In fact, I was there between 1996 and 2000, and at that time it was starting to be discussed, within what was the Nat Geo television department, whether it was necessary to include in the credits a text that said "Some of these scenes have been staged", since the percentage of staged footage was extremely high. Now it is much easier to film in nature, because cameras weigh much less and go more unnoticed, there are drones and trap cameras, but in my father's time they filmed on cinema, imagine, 35-millimeter cameras.

Do you think your father would have adapted to the world of TikTok?

— I am sure about that. In the 70s, television was starting in Spain and my father bet on making nature documentaries when there was no school for it here —it was not like the BBC—, it was a commitment to innovate and completely break away from what had been done until then. Furthermore, it was multimedia, because he did television, but also radio, publishing, games, comics... I believe he would have followed this same pattern of innovating. In fact, on social media there are several videos of my father in black and white that have gone viral, such as the one about the "civilization of trash," which millions of people have seen. He was very much into social media, if you think about it, in the sense that he would suddenly launch something very short but very powerful, and in two minutes he would hook you with what he was saying. In other words, he was a communicator who, whatever the format, would completely master the medium and reach the people, which is what matters.

For you, now, as a communicator, which medium do you find most effective?

— What I like most are the conferences, because you have a very one-on-one relationship with people, and I also like radio a lot. I am on social media, but I have to admit that taking on the role of influencer, that is, making videos of yourself explaining things, requires having a special character, and that is not for me; I feel a certain shame exposing myself so much.

You created and presided over the Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente Foundation from 2004 to 2017. Why did you decide to create it and why did you leave it?

— I created it as a way to embrace my father's legacy and give it projection through today's projects, with his underlying message. We held exhibitions, magazines like Agenda Viva, online games, a guarantee mark called Consuma Naturalidad for food products from indigenous products and local varieties, very focused on the rural world. But it happened that, after the economic crisis, the foundation went into bankruptcy and was finally frozen. It was enormously difficult to maintain it because Spain does not have the philanthropic culture that Anglo-Saxon countries have; here most of the aid is public and that gives you little independence, because you have to fit into bases that are already predetermined. And we had a vision quite different from the usual vision of nature conservation: it was hard for us to fit in because we always linked it to the human being.

Following in the footsteps of El hombre y la tierra...

— Of course, and it wasn't very clear if we were an environmental NGO, because we worked on many topics such as agriculture, livestock, forest management... things that now, with the terrible fires we have experienced, are better understood.

Now you have written a book for teenagers.

— This latest book, Som natura, comes after another book I released for a children's audience called La historia más fascinante del mundo. In both cases, it is about bringing young people closer to nature, not so much from the sense of responsibility, which is one of the ways it is conveyed in schools, such as recycling and other topics, but from another point of view. There are many adolescents who enter a kind of identity crisis, they ask themselves deep questions, and I wanted to explain to them that, in this whole process of finding their place in the world, nature is their best friend. Because we are nature; to explain to them that we depend on nature for everything, not only regarding resources, but also for what it contributes to our happiness: nature brings us stillness, beauty, a sense of belonging. Some difficult emotional moments for adolescents are linked to an enormous denaturalization, to growing up in cities without any contact with nature and with more machines. Nature can bring them that sense of belonging, that peace, that rest and that feeling of being accompanied.

And it is a positive message, which is also good within the scientific communication of ecology nowadays, where there is a certain tendency towards catastrophism. Are you a climate optimist or where do you stand?

— I think I am a realist. I think it is not so much a question of optimism or pessimism as it is of the importance of knowledge: knowledge is power. It is about empowering; what I like is to provide tools so that people can know how fascinating the world we live in is, to have sensitivity so that the harm we are doing to the living planetary system stirs your gut, and from these tools and this sensitivity, that you become an agent of change.