In 2005, while filming the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Yann Arthus-Bertrand fell to earth in a helicopter accident. On the way down, he says, he had no fear of dying, but he was filled with thoughts of "home". When he discovered he'd survived, this feeling crystallised into two separate imperatives. He had an urgent need to phone his wife: "I'm alive!" he announced breathlessly. "Why are you phoning me at three in the morning to tell me that?" she wondered, unamused. And he had a longing for a glass of wine. "Wine is France, it is alive, it is love! I wanted it deeply. It's my terroir!"

Arthus-Bertrand is recalling this near-death experience as he uncorks a bottle of lunchtime Burgundy in what is very much his terroir: a small wooden hut in the midst of the dense woodland of the Bois de Boulogne, west of Paris. The hut, which is dominated by a large throne-like chair made of driftwood, lies at the back of the office of GoodPlanet.org, the foundation Arthus-Bertrand has created as his one-man mission to save mankind from its destructive nature. The hut in the trees is where he comes to plan his strategy.

His mission is mostly a propaganda war, and one that he is waging on many fronts all at once. Arthus-Bertrand made his name as an aerial photographer; his celebrated book The Earth from the Air, published in 2000, has sold 3.5m copies; large-scale exhibitions of those photographs are currently on display in the streets of 154 of the world's cities. He has used some of the proceeds from that project to help to fund a series of spin-offs that attempt to focus humanity's vision not only on the beauty of the planet, but the ways it is being destroyed. The foundation supports large-scale carbon-offsetting initiatives, and education programmes which take urban children out into the countryside (13 schools in France are named after Arthus-Bertrand at the insistence of their pupils).

The foundation has also generated two landmark documentary films: Home, a spectacular bird's-eye polemic that catalogues our impact on the earth's surface (and which has seen Arthus-Bertrand routinely referred to as the "French Al Gore"), and Six Billion Others, which attempts to archive the hopes and dreams of human voices from all corners of the planet. Home, which was distributed free in cinemas (in most of the world, except Britain) is also available to download for nothing online at homethemovie.org (19 million people have watched it so far; the virtual visitors' book attests to its life-changing qualities).

Not surprisingly for someone who has looked down on perhaps more of the earth's surface than anyone in history, Arthus-Bertrand gives the impression of having both a stubborn big-picture mentality and an exacting eye for detail. At 65, he brims with restless energy; when I first saw him in his office he was literally running between meetings. His keen young staff have the edgy manner of those always trying to anticipate the latest enthusiasm of their boss. They watch him, and his trademark moustache, as he swoops around the office like a bird of prey.

Arthus-Bertrand's most recent obsession has been to get Home shown in cinemas and on TV in America and the UK, the two countries that have proved most resistant to his message. "Why is that?" he wonders, "because I am French? Because it is free? Because the cinemas have to get involved with the project?" Possibly all of the above, I suggest. He is just back from New York, where a successful screening has prompted distribution across 100 cities. Britain is proving more intractable. Arthus-Bertrand has an ally in Prince Charles, who screened the film at Clarence House to an invited audience. But he had no luck with the BBC. "Even Chinese state television broadcast it at primetime," he says.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand. Photograph: Observer

You do not get the sense Arthus-Bertrand is a man who gives up easily. He is the heir (along with five siblings) to the Parisian jewellers that bears his surname and which among other things has held the warrant to supply medals and honours to the French state since the revolution. He left home at 17 with dreams of being a film star. "I had no money; I was in the street," he recalls. "I was cleaning the cinema studio. Then I became the third assistant. But in two years I was getting roles in films, living in St Tropez. I was a bad actor though. I met my first wife, and she happened to have a wild-animal park in France. Together we have made a safari park for 10 years." In that time he suggests, "I rediscovered nature. I was very involved with animals, breeding lions, tigers and so on."

At 30, following in the footsteps of the gorilla-conservationists Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, he decided to pursue his passions in Africa. "I quit France," he recalls, "I quit my first wife, and went to live with my second wife and her two children in Kenya, with a family of lions." In the Masai Mara he became friends with the wildlife photographer Jonathan Scott. And through him he discovered cameras. "The lions taught me how to take photographs though, really," he says. "They taught me patience and beauty. To make my living I was flying tourists in a hot-air balloon. And the two things came together, flying and photography."

Arthus-Bertrand worked for a while as a photo-journalist for National Geographic and Geo, but he was anxious to make a wider impact. Working on assignment at the 1992 earth summit in Rio, he recognised his destiny. "My life was changed completely by what I saw and heard there," he says. "I was influenced very much at that moment also by the photographer Sebastião Salgado, who was my friend, and who had made these thematic studies of human life. Taking inspiration from him I decided I had to photograph the entire planet from above." It took him some time to organise funding; he mortgaged his home, begged and borrowed money but eventually "for nearly two years I was flying above the planet with my camera. I knew straight away that this was something important to do, just at this moment, a portrait of the planet for the millennium year. I worked in 80 countries, fighting for money all the time. But the book was incredibly successful from the very first day."

How, I wonder, does he now measure his success, beyond sales figures?

"I don't think it is necessary to measure it exactly," he says. "You want to spread the message. To have success in your professional life is not so hard. To succeed as a man is more difficult. What I am doing now helps me to succeed as a man."

The Arthus-Bertrand philosophy is a simple one. "The key of The Earth from Above, and of Home is to show the beauty of the planet, and thereby to promote love for it. I asked a group of 11- to 14-year-olds the other day: 'Do you believe humanity will end soon?'" he says. "And they nearly all said, 'Yes I do believe it.' 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%."

Home is full of statistics like this, all intoned (in the English-language version) by Glenn Close's omnipotent voiceover: that 20% of the world's population consumes 80% of its resources, that 1 billion people have no access to safe drinking water, that species are dying out at a rhythm 1,000 times faster than the natural rate, that three-quarters of fishing grounds are exhausted… These figures are reinforced by Arthus-Bertrand's stunning visual evidence: of the dried-up River Jordan, of the shrinking ice caps, of the ghosts of irrigation projects in the desert. Arthus-Bertrand co-scripted the film, and he speaks in the Gallic poetry of doom: "Oil will be the new measure of time," he will say, as we count down the days of our chronic dependency. Or, "Our cells still talk the language of trees." Or, of our rapacious need for fossil fuels: "We pick every pocket of stored sunlight."

There is something biblical about the scope of his film, though he is anything but religious. Flying above the globe in his all-seeing helicopter, he was struck most often not by a sense of creation but by humility at the epic story of life that we have lately gatecrashed: "You have to understand, to really understand, that when you look at the Grand Canyon what you are looking at is billions and billions of animals reduced to limestone, individual life on an impossible scale layered in a period of time we cannot imagine." When the film came out Arthus-Bertrand had hundreds of letters saying, "You liar! You say the world was made in 4bn years. It was done in seven days." All of these letters, he notes, came from America. He laughs. "Life is an amazing story, but it is not that story. And what it teaches us is that we will disappear one day. When people say save the planet, I think they are wrong: the planet will survive us, of course it will, life will survive us. What we are trying to save is humanity."

Arthus-Bertrand, to some, goes about this work in a naïve way. He places his primary hope not only in practical action – though, given his air miles, he is by necessity a world-class offsetter – but more in a "spiritual revolution" that will involve not only individuals but also corporations and governments. He sat next to President Sarkozy for the French launch of Home. His films are supported by a range of commercial sponsors, most of whom can see the benefits of "greenwashing"; he adopts the pragmatic view that it is better that people see his work than question too closely the credentials of those who finance it. "I think," he says "to be an ecologist is to love life in its broadest sense. It is not consumers and big industry on one side, and ecologists on the other. We are all linked."

In the pages of France's left-wing press, Yann Arthus-Bertrand is routinely referred to as the "helicologiste", a reference to his preferred mode of transport, as well as the way he can seem to want to rise above some of the world's more intractable questions. His critics suggest he is an opportunist and point to the fact, for example, that he was for many years the official photographer of the (not overly environmentally friendly) Paris-Dakar rally; they dislike the fact that he can afford to say things like: "This morning, running like every morning in the forest of Rambouillet, near my home, and seeing a doe and her fawn flee before me, I remembered my stay with Dian Fossey and the gorillas in Rwanda…" And they take particular exception to his laissez-faire attitude towards corporate sponsorship and advertising in his films. Home is sponsored by PPR, the fashion group whose brands include Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. In the past he has worked with companies such as Air France and energy giant EDF. He is unrepentant.

"Often," he says, "the greens are not close enough to the reality of the economy. Perhaps it is because my parents have a factory and I know it is not so easy to hold your principles always and still get things done. In France we are the most cynical and sceptical people in the world – even more than the British. Everything you do, someone says you are hypocrite. I have a lot of attacks here: people say my parents are rich, my movie was helped by sponsors, I am a right winger. All of this. NGOs work on poverty or environment or whatever. But the thing they never speak about is love. For me that is the starting point. It has to be. I used to speak about this all the time in France. [French daily newspaper] Libération called me 'The Great Idiot', 'The Enormous Idiot'. I don't care. I think the new religion is going to be the quest for global survival. And I think that has to start with love: love of the planet, love of the six billion others we share it with, love of life. We have to love if we are to survive."

If his aerial vision has taught him any thing it is that nothing exists in isolation from anything else; pollutants do not respect national or any other boundaries. "I live in a forest," he says. "I asked the water company for an analysis of my water. It said I had this much pesticide, I have this many nitrates. But they say they are under the dangerous level, and like all of us I have to take them at their word. If our water and air are contaminated though, it is all of our water and all of our air, not just that bit over there."

Even so, he classes himself as an optimist, just because the alternative is not an option. He places faith in the idea that his spiritual revolution can occur, though acknowledging that the evidence stacks up against it. "The planet's population has nearly tripled in my lifetime," he says. "And the problem is everyone wants to live like us." Arthus-Bernard was in Borneo filming Home, in an area of deforestation. He stopped to refuel and spoke to a man driving a huge tractor trailing the chains that uproot swathes of trees. He told him about global warming, about orangutans, the whole story. The man looked him in the eye: "You come in helicopter to tell me how to live? I have to feed my family. I don't care about trees. I want to buy a 4x4."

Later the same man took Arthus-Bertrand out on the river through the jungle on a very simple boat. Under a tin roof in a cabin the man's wife was feeding her baby, and watching an American soap opera on a flatscreen television. "She was dreaming of a fast car, and these beautiful clothes," Arthus-Bertrand recalls. "That is what we have created. Everyone naturally wants this paradise that we have, where happiness is to have more things. Always to have more. We have to work out another way."

One of the questions he asks his subjects in his mass-communication project Six Billion Others is "What is the hardest challenge you face?" Before I leave his hut in the woods, I turn that question on him.

He answers without hesitation: "My challenge is to lose my ego, completely," he says, with feeling. Having spent a couple of hours with him, I can see why that might present an insistent difficulty. "And then to lose my material possessions, to lose that desire. I would love to be like that, but I am not brave enough to do it. In our hearts few of us are. But I will work at it. I will have to; we all will," he drains his glass of wine. "The fact is," he says, "when it comes to our planet, none of us want to believe what we already know."

For more information visit goodplanet.org

Calling all independent cinemas



Yann Arthus-Bertrand's epic feature film Home has been seen by 19 million people around the world, but has not been publicly shown in the UK. If you run a cinema and would be interested in organising a special screening in conjunction with the Observer please make contact with us at magazine@observer.co.uk. Details of the screenings will be announced in due course