Gérard and Margi Moss – exploring the environment

Gérard and Margi Moss – exploring the environment
Ever since the mid-80s, Gérard and Margi have travelled all over Brazil and around the world in light aircraft, at low altitude, attune with the land, seas, forests and deserts that pass beneath their wings.

As they watched the landscape go by, they noticed the precarious state of so many rivers, the stubborn march of desertification, the open wounds left in the forests by slashing-and-burning, villagers and native peoples becoming environmental refugees – and they decided to act.

They specifically chose “water” as their theme. Ironically enough, it’s from the air that they can best “explore” the environment using innovative technology on a geographical scale.

Thus, in recent years, they have used light aviation’s strong points – access to remote locations, low-level flights, a moving observation deck and photography platform – in the service of the environmental cause, working together with prominent Brazilian scientists.

Gérard is totally at home in the sky. A private pilot with almost 5,000 hours in command, he reconciles a passion for flying with the technical curiosity of an engineer to understand how things work, putting together environmental projects where an aircraft can do the job more efficiently than a team on the ground. This is a large plus in a country as vast as Brazil.

With the rare experience under his belt of having twice flown a small aircraft around the world, encountering the most adverse and diverse conditions along the way, a calm and methodical presence of mind is vital for those difficult moments when he has to creep past cumulus-nimbus clouds or collect water samples by skimming the surface of a river tucked inside a narrow avenue of tree-lined banks.

Margi, pen and camera at hand, accompanies him on these challenging and often grueling flights. A nature-lover ever since her childhood growing up in Kenya, she is perfectly used to sleeping rough or riding the storms that come their way. The photos she takes through the small storm-window can be shocking or enigmatic, or simply beautiful and touching. “Nature paints the pictures, I just press the button,” she claims.

Having lived in Rio de Janeiro for 25 years, Brazil is their true home and they are naturalized Brazilians. They recently moved away from the lushness of the Atlantic rainforest to the drier cerrado biome that surrounds Brasilia, in the very heart of the country.