No one is an environmentalist by birth. It is only your path, your life, your travels that awaken you.

No one is an environmentalist by birth. It is only your path, your life, your travels that awaken you.

The lions taught me photography. They taught me patience and the sense of beauty, a beauty that penetrates you.

I learned to be a hot-air balloon pilot to take tourists over the Masai Mara Reserve in order to earn some money and finance the work I was doing with my wife, Anne. We were studying the life of a family of lions for more than two years. Taking pictures was a way to capture information we could not put in words.

An image of the Earth, its landscapes, directly affects people. The beauty of the Earth creates enormous emotion, and through that emotion, you can transmit knowledge and raise consciousness.