Photographer, reporter, director, environmental activist, president of the GoodPlanet Foundation, Yann Arthus-Bertrand has toured the world, his images and his reports too. His best-known book is The earth from the sky. This one comes out with a new edition, new photos, new captions. He also publishes the book: Legacy – The Legacy of a Lifetime, published by La Martinière.
franceinfo: Legacy – The Legacy of a Lifetime is a very intimate story, with a growing concern which is frightening, moreover.
Yann Arthus-Bertrand: But are you not afraid when you read the IPCC report? When people talk about the Sixth Extinction, doesn’t that scare you?
I inevitably want to believe it.
Yes, but that’s kind of the problem. Today, we all believe in the future, saying to ourselves: “Anyway, we’re gonna get there, we’re gonna get out of this rut“and at the end of the day, we’re in complete denial.
“When you see what happened with the cyclones in the United States, it’s incredible, they had never known that. We are heading towards an unbalanced world.”
Yann Arthus-Bertrandto franceinfo
When the Secretary General of the United Nations tells you: “We’re heading for an imminent catastrophe“. Me, that scares me. Me, I did not think, in my life, to see climate change unfolding before my eyes. I made the film The 150 on the citizens’ convention. I saw this momentum how together, as citizens, we can try to change things, but we do not take the path at all. When scientists tell you: “There you have it, the climate we had for ten thousand years, on which our civilization was built, it is gone forever. We will have to live in a different way“. And we didn’t realize that at all, we continue to live in exactly the same way. I don’t have the solution.
There is a solution syndrome, but the solution will come through personal awareness. It’s not the politics that will change the world because politics are run by their constituents, I’m sure. When there is a march for the climate in Paris, there are 40,000 of us, we are very happy. When there is the arrival of the World Cup, there are two million of us. When we will be two million in the street to walk for the climate, maybe we will all change together.
You will quickly fall in love with photography. The goal is really to tell and take stock of the Earth.
I wanted to do a big job before the year 2000. I said to myself: the year 2000 is going to happen, hey, I’m going to do a job on the Earth seen from the sky. In the beginning, it was much more to talk about beauty. And it’s true that at that time, we have to imagine that we weren’t talking about climate change at all. And God knows I used fossil fuels, I was criticized for the helicopter, but we did not know at the time. When the book came out, I wasn’t the same person anymore.
I would like us to discuss your childhood since you address it in this book, you say: “I did a lot of bullshit, I was unbearable. A stubborn, uncontrollable teenager. At 17, I had no future“. It’s true that it was unexpected to see you succeed. At 12, you were fighting with your teachers.
I had this kind of violence in me, which I still have a little bit. Anger, injustice. It’s a bit like the buzz of Four hundred strokes by François Truffaut (1959). This stubborn kid who doesn’t want anything, who is last, who is near the radiator, who cheats all the time, who only exists with his friends by playing the con.
“I was a rather lost kid, but very confident in myself, with a very strong personality. I wasn’t worried in the end.”
Yann Arthus-Bertrandto franceinfo
Everyone says in their life: “I met Professor Machin who made me discover etc … “Me, I did not have this teacher. I rather had priests with wandering hands.
We realize that women have given you a lot. You fell in love with your best friend’s mother, she was 24 years older than you. Did the women save you?
They didn’t save me, but they helped me a lot. Often, I tell myself that maybe I haven’t delivered enough. By making this movie Woman (2019), I tell myself that maybe I haven’t been good enough with the women in my life, I admit. The first woman who was 24 years older than me, I was very much in love. It was above all she who made me who I am today, who made me discover nature and animals.
And after, when I left, I met Anne with her two little boys, who are my children, and we went to Kenya together. There is a wonderful side to women who know how to give themselves completely to the people they love and Anne didn’t hesitate for a second. She left. She quit her job, took her children. She went to Kenya with a guy who had no money, who had no future, for love and that, I don’t know if I would have been able to do it. It’s nice.
I feel like this book was also a way of saying thank you to your parents.
I was such a terrible kid … I left home when I was 17. And one day, my father said to me, I was 60 years old: “You know when you left, your mother cried everyday, in bed, for months“. And me, I did not call my parents, it was terrible, how can we? If my children had done this to me, I don’t know if I would have put up with it. And one day, I’m going to see my mother and I said to her: I would like to apologize for everything I have done. So there she bursts out laughing and says to me: “But we forgive our children everything“and that made me feel good. Knowing how to say forgiveness is important.
With my father, I failed to do so. We saw each other, we talked to each other, we couldn’t say things to each other. I could only say to him: well, we didn’t get along, we are not made the same, but thank you for what you did for me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t tell him. You have to know how to tell people that you love them, that’s important.
Cancre at school, self-taught, you didn’t learn anything in school, but you were always curious.
Even today, I am curious. I don’t feel like I’m getting old, I feel like I’m growing up every day. I have never worked as much as I do now, it nourishes me completely.
But above all what I mean is that life has no meaning, it is you who decides to give meaning to your life. Are you happy with what you’re doing? Are you happy with your job? Do you feel like you are useful today? These are questions that I ask myself more and more now and I think that the current moment is extremely important in the history of mankind, the meaning is even more important: Do what I do, serves, is useful?