Using Visual Poetry to Heal the Planet with Louie Schwartzberg

The Global Wellness Summit (GWS) has had many guests across various fields in the wellness industry on Global Wellness Conversations, but our guest today is a first: A visual artist who uses his talent to help people fall in love with nature and be motivated to protect it. We’re talking to the famed cinematographer Louie Schwartzberg.

Louie’s visuals—which you may be familiar with from the likes of Netflix, Disney, or National Geographic—are breathtaking and awe-inspiring, soaring above mountains and oceans and swooping down to see an insect through a drop of water on a leaf or exploring beneath the surface of the ground to see the magical network of mushrooms. He’s a pioneer in time-lapse photography as well as altered speed and scale cinematography. His TED Talks have had over 53 million views on YouTube, and his goal is to make the invisible visible, to take us on journeys of time and scale… to change our perspective, touch our hearts, and move us to action.

Nancy Davis, GWS executive director, had this to say about Louie: “Louie Schwartzberg is the personification of his life’s work. As he captures and shares the unfolding, unimaginable grace of nature, Louie is himself a force of nature and a gift to us all. His intelligence, warmth, humor, and elegant humanity have long been signature elements of the Global Wellness Summit. Whether he’s opening our eyes to the universal truth in a drop of rain, urging us to care about the planet by showing us its beauty—not diminishing its assets, or whether he’s demonstrating the complex network of fungi that lies beneath our feet, Louie lives a life true to his mission to leave this world better than when he found it.”

Louie explains that he is part of the Global Wellness Institute (GWI) Psychedelics & Healing Initiative to help support the exploration of this secret of nature’s knowledge. As a leader in the space, Louie discusses how his work is used for a new Visual Healing program in hospitals as well as in psilocybin-assisted therapy for people suffering from addiction and trauma. As he describes working on his Netflix film, Fantastic Fungi, you’ll hear how the underground mycelium network is reminiscent of the world wide web.

We’ll discuss Louie’s origin story, what brought him to create moving pictures of nature, and how his 40-year opus, Gratitude Revealed, is really a tribute to his parents who are Holocaust survivors.

This conversation not only illustrates why Louie is a part of the GWI and GWS family but also why sustainability and wellness go hand in hand and why each of us should seek out the wonder and awe in the lives we live each day. 

To learn more, visit Louie Schwartzberg’s site at MovingArt.com.

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Sponsored by Murad Skincare

Hosted by Kim Marshall.

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