As an author whose vision has been formed during the last thirty years of my life, I have chosen to communicate this vision in a language that I trust many on this planet will understand.
About
As an author whose vision has been formed during the last thirty years of my life, I have chosen to communicate this vision in a language that I trust many on this planet will understand.
The choice to independently publish “Battle for Life” – including publishing it myself (name of the publisher’s: OMENTOKE), was not the easiest one in the short term. However, from a creative point of view, it was decidedly the most rewarding choice, primarily because of my deep sense of the value of life. I did not, therefore, allow any economic, political or religious influences to cloud my vision and thus, as it appears in “Battle for Life”, my vision is represented as purely as possible.
During my travels in the past 25 years, most of my supporters have asked me to do my own thing, in my own way and I have always tried to be loyal to this objective – in combination, of course, with my basic underlying passion for all living creatures. In my work I hope to achieve much more than merely saying “I saw it with my own eyes and I raised my camera each time so that what I saw could enrich my vision to pass it on to others”; I am adding up my experiences one by one, in order to create one big whole which I hope will help complete the puzzle of our complex eco-system and its interactions.
In order to remain aware of what I consider a “complete and unrestricted version” of what is necessarily a limited catalogue, I have tried to mirror myself. However, I was born in a part of the world where the strength of the economy creates a much higher level than that of ecology as a whole. Living near the gigantic port of Antwerp I estimate that only 5% of the 33-km economic radius around it consists of nature as it always has. The wildlife, including the migratory birds, are suffering because of the industry but the quality of the air that all living creatures have to breath in is also far from pleasant or healthy. The best farmland is now forever lost and most cultural aspects of our own history have been flooded by polluted water over the past five decades. In the name of so-called “progress” I saw and felt, along with some of my contemporaries, that many parts of the world are changing irreversibly and too fast. Sitting back and doing nothing while our ecological basis of life deteriorates exponentially just isn’t my style. I felt motivated to do something, to help find solutions that can benefit this generation, and all those that come after it. But at the same time I had to stay true to my roots and the urban lifestyle that had been mine since childhood. This enabled me to recount my journeys with a sense of reality, overlaid with adventures and magic. Since childhood I have always been attracted to the rich diversity of the tropics and especially the fast evolving life forms of Amazonia. Seeing amphibians floating in 'Rivierenhof Park' with my own eyes while days before I had admire their mating rituals and their spectacular behaviour in the Amazon, I was shocked and concerned that this destructive polluting process could also harm the richest eco-system on Earth. The Amazon and its inhabitants are truly magical and through my work I have tried to represent this, as proof that this eco-system is one of the richest on earth and requires global protection. And I am not the only one – most people in the world agree with this conclusion, and so we all have a powerful reason to protect our planet’s most natural purification asset.
My book does not aim to point the finger at anyone in particular, unless we consider it absolutely necessary. At times it goes straight to the heart of the agro-industry and the pharmaceutical industry.
But, working with others, I have tried to suggest solutions and alternatives with specialists, so that we can all have a clear idea of what is really going on in our world. This world, this globe is so unique, thanks to its different climate zones and geography – but nowadays they are changing so fast that global warming is the result. All the life forms have adapted to one or more climate zones and are quite capable of continuing to adapt and evolve in response to change. But it is the seemingly uncontrollable speed of global warming that means that most of the life forms on earth are under serious threat – with some even vanishing before anybody ever knew of their existence.
My objective was to document the wonders of our world, through my many photographs of extremely endangered areas, animals and natives.
