To accompany the release of his book Lumière, published by Éditions Allary, Matthieu Ricard is offering a series of blogs on photography. An invitation to share wonder, celebrate the beauty of the world, and continue the quest for light that has guided him throughout his sixty-year journey.
To accompany the release of his book Lumière, published by Allary Editions, Matthieu Ricard presents a series of blog posts devoted to photography. An invitation to share a sense of wonder, to celebrate the beauty of the world, and to continue this quest for light that has run through his life’s work for over sixty years.
The beauty of nature is a source of wonder that never leads to saturation, unlike many ordinary pleasures and sensations that fade and lose their intensity the more we indulge in them. The happiness of being immersed in a natural environment endures and deepens with experience, giving rise to a sense of fulfillment that, over time, can become a lasting trait of our character.
And yet, are we moved by nature deeply enough to act with determination and radically change our ways of living? Humanity has indeed marked the history of the planet through the extraordinary development of its intelligence, philosophical thought, art, and sciences—but also through its role as a super-predator. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the history of life on Earth unfolded without us, yet no other species has transformed the biosphere so quickly and so radically.
As highlighted by a study published in the journal Science, over the past century humans have become the dominant predator in many biological systems—an abnormal and unbalanced predator. The species we affect, directly or indirectly, are experiencing dramatic declines. In the wild, predators generally reach a balance with their prey populations, allowing both to persist. Sadly, this is not the case for the human species, whose ecological impact far exceeds that of any other known predator. The number of Homo sapiens who have lived on Earth is estimated at around 115 billion (just 10,000 years ago, there were only a few million of us), which is also the number of animals we kill every two months to satisfy our so-called needs.
And yet, an inclination toward all living things and an appreciation of natural environments is a deeply human tendency, known as “biophilia,” or “love of life.” The biologist Edward O. Wilson defined it as “the innate tendency of humans to focus on life and lifelike processes.” Most of us experience this spontaneously, often without even being aware of it. There is therefore a striking and dysfunctional contradiction between our attraction to nature and the destructive—often irreversible—effects of our behavior on the biosphere.
Scientists agree that it is not yet too late to act, provided we do so now and with the greatest determination. According to environmental scientist Johann Rockström, we have less than ten years left to avoid the worst outcomes, by profoundly changing our ways of living. Today, as early as August, we have already exhausted the planet’s annual supply of renewable resources. It is therefore more essential than ever to question our lifestyles and our model of civilization as a whole, to give priority to respecting biodiversity and natural habitats, to learn to live better by consuming less, and to show far greater consideration than we do today for future generations and for other species.
Let us listen to astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who has so beautifully photographed our blue planet:
“We live on a unique island of life and beauty—fragile, threatened, lost in the vast hostility of the cosmos. […] Today, more than ever, the future of Earth, our future, is in our hands.”
You can find this entire photographic project in Lumière, published by Éditions Allary.
Matthieu Ricard donates all of his income—royalties from his books, photographs, and lectures—to development projects run by the Karuna-Shechen association, which works to reduce poverty and empower the most vulnerable women, men, and children. In this way, every reader becomes a direct contributor to solidarity through their purchase.