I always take hundreds and hundreds of pictures. I used to work for National Geographic, and they gave us a lot of film.

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

The trust we build over the years if of tremendous help to me when I start in a new project and need to find associates.

Will we be able to imagine a new culture of water?

I wanted to be a scientist. I did a thesis on lions. But I realised photography can show things writing can't. Lions were my professor of photography.

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.

Our children think our world will end. It's a tragic thing. Adults don't think that. They don't see that we are eating the planet. But we are. If you take all the biomass of vertebrates on the planet, 98% are men and their domestic animals. All the wild animals in the world make up only 2%.