So that springs still sing
My children jump in puddles. They roll in the mud, pick up a branch and turn it into a rocket. I watch them and I see myself. A child of thermo-industrial civilisation, I grew up in a world where abundance, progress and freedom seemed to go without saying, where “going to Mars seems more exciting, sexier, more virile, than landing on Earth”, as Bruno Latour put it. Like the Shadoks, I pumped. I am still pumping.
But I do not believe we have to choose between flight to Mars and guilt. There is still the Earth. We still have to land on it, and that may be the most beautiful adventure awaiting us.
I learned this along the way. By bicycle first, over more than 30,000 kilometres, then from film to film, from the Sahara to the Arctic, from Amazonia to Papua. I have met peoples who know how to read a landscape, communities who are building, here and now, the world they dream of, scientists who discover every day that the living world is more inventive than we imagined. Everywhere, the same plain truth: everything is connected. Rocks and trees, salmon and forests, wolves and rivers. And us in the middle.
That is why I write and direct films and podcasts. To inspire wonder first, because we only protect what we have learned to love. To understand, because the world is richer than our certainties. And finally to warn, because what binds us is under threat, and there is still time.
I choose wonder over stupefaction. Nuance over din. The long view over the flow. Story over fear.
I know my contradictions: to bring back a story, you sometimes have to fly, and a camera does not exist without the Earth’s resources. I accept them on one condition: that every image brought back serves a purpose.
For a film should not be an end in itself. I no longer want only to make films: I want to build projects in which the film is just one stone. Projects conceived from the outset with the women and men who take action, which begin long before the shoot and continue long after the broadcast, through podcasts, talks, screenings, actions carried out together. The film is their visible heart. The rest is written by many hands, before, during and after.
I believe in collective intelligence. I want to unite, to bring together, to join forces with those who are no longer content to question the future, but are already sowing the seeds of other possibilities.
One day, my children will ask me what we did. I would like to answer them with something other than regret. I do not yet know how we are going to land. I know we will only manage it together.