What if the problem is not that we don’t know enough, but that we’ve forgotten how to truly see?

For Marie-Claire Greve, photographer and long-time ambassador for Climate Cleanup, the starting point is not urgency, but attention. Not crisis, but connection. And, more fundamentally, a renewed sense of value. “The moment people begin to feel connected to the value of the Earth, I am convinced their choices and behaviour will naturally begin to change.”

Observing nature

“I spent a lot of time alone in nature as a child,” she says. “Simply observing plants, insects, and the soil.” That early sense of connection would later shape her path. She moved into entrepreneurship and, in the 1990s co-founded an initiative focused on reconnecting people with food systems and restoring value to producers. “We saw farmers earning almost nothing,” she explains. “while the system around them captured most of the value.”

It was an effort to rebalance the system. But over time, the initiative began to reflect the very dynamics it aimed to change. “It became more commercial,” she says. “And then you realise: you’re operating within the same logic again.” So she stepped away, back to what felt authentic. This meant returning to observation, and eventually to photography.

A new perspective on nature

From above, landscapes reveal patterns that are nearly impossible to see from the ground: textures, colours, and systems unfolding at scale. Her aerial photography captures this prespective, often in such abstract way that the subject is not immediately recognisable.

“That’s essential,” she explains. “When people don’t immediately understand what they’re looking at, curiosity is sparked. And they begin to see nature with fresh eyes.”

The Earth knows what to do

Marie-Claire is deliberate in how she speaks about climate change. Not because she questions its urgency, but because she reflects critically on how it is framed. In her view, what we are witnessing is not only breakdown, but also the Earth’s response: a system reacting to disturbance, moving towards a new equilibrium through droughts, floods and storms. This perspective does not diminish the seriousness of the consequences, but it reframes them, from pure collapse to a system responding to imbalance.  

“If you give nature the space,” she says, “it knows what to do.” She has seen landscapes recover, soils come back to life, and ecosystems restore themselves when given the opportunity.

Everything comes from the Earth

At the heart of her thinking lies a simple yet often overlooked truth: the Earth has value, far beyond economical terms. “Our food, our materials, our homes: everything originates from the Earth,” she says. And yet, for many people, that connection has faded. “We no longer see how things grow. We rarely touch the soil,” she says. “And as a result, we lose our sense of its true value.”

That distance makes it easier to treat the Earth merely as a resource, rather than as something we are intrinsically part of. “A piece of land is not simply something you own,” she says. “It’s something you care for, and pass on.”

Restoring that sense of value, she believes, is where meaningful change begins. Through her work as a nature photographer, Marie-Claire seeks to bring that awareness back into view. Not by telling people what to think, but by inviting them to look more closely. Change does not begin with systems alone, but with how we relate to the world around us. “When people reconnect with the Earth and recognise its value,” she says, “their choices begin to change naturally.”

Recognising the value

“I see many positive developments,” she adds. “More than we often realise.” They are not always visible, but they exist: in small-scale initiatives, in restored landscapes, and in individuals choosing to act differently.

Perhaps change begins with something deceptively simple: learning to look again, and recognising the value of what has always been there. Once you see it, it becomes diffecult to unsee. And even harder not to protect.