Joel Sartore on Saving the World’s Remaining Wild Species, One Photograph at a Time

“Most humans will sit for their pictures to be taken, so that’s not a problem. If you understand what drives people, what they’re motivated by, that’s fine. But with animals, it’s different. It’s hard to speak their language a lot of the time.”

— Joel Sartore

Joel Sartore, National Geographic Fellow and long-time contributing photographer for National Geographic’s family of magazines and websites, opened his TEDx DeExtinction talk by explaining that, for more than 20 years, he had travelled the world, taking pictures of various conservation issues.

And then, one day, he realized he needed to do more.

“I realized that what I’m doing here in the wild,” he said, pointing to a giant screen image of a sea turtle finding its way back to sea on a lonely tropical beach, “is just not enough. Through my career I have seen more and more species head towards extinction. So now I’m in the second act of my career. I’m 50-years-old. Maybe I have 20 years left. Maybe. If I’m lucky. What am I going to do to save species?

“I went from doing this—” he said, pointing at the image of the turtle on the beach, “to taking black and white backgrounds with me and doing this—“ he said, pointing at a new image of a turtle swimming, just the turtle, in silhouette, with a clear white backdrop in the background.

The difference to the naked eye is simple: One is an action photo, taken in the wild; the other is a more traditional portrait photo, a close-up of a single animal, with nothing else to distract the eye.

So what, you might ask.

Simple, Sartore would say. One is an action shot, taken in the wild, a single moment not unlike countless other single moments, all vying for attention. Seen today, forgotten tomorrow. The other, he explains, is immortal. A portrait photo, well taken, is forever.

“I started doing this more and more. Everywhere I can go, everywhere National Geographic sends me, every continent, every state, all the time. 

“I started eight years ago. I called it The Photo Ark. The goal is to get animals on black-and-white backgrounds, and get people to care. That’s it. Look them in the eye. See how amazing amphibians are? Reptiles? Whatever I have to do to get people to care.

“What’s it going to take? I don’t know. So far it hasn’t worked out too well for me. I’m seeing almost 50 percent of all amphibians either at extinction now or at risk of extinction. Down to eight, seven, five or four, a couple. Now you’re looking at the very last one. We’re talking about extinction today. I see species right before they go extinct.

“That’s where I come in. . . . I really need to tell the world about this.”

This coming weekend, National Geographic’s specialty channel NatGeo Wild premieres a two-part, two-week special, Photo Ark, which accompanies Sartore on his 25-year mission to take portrait photos of some 15,000 species.

Now age 57, by his reckoning he is two-thirds of the way there: 10,531 species to be exact. This past May he recorded his 10,000th species: a güiña, the smallest wildcat in the Americas, which he photographed at Fauna Andina, a wildlife reserve in Chile. The photo was a milestone nearly 15 years in the making.

“What do I have to do? I think about this question all the time — what do I do, what do I do, what do I do?

“Every class of animal is now at risk. We’re at risk of  losing half of all species by the turn of the next century. We know it’s bad. What to do. My goal is to get people engaged. Get the public engaged. That’s the thing. How do we do this? We have to make it interesting. We have to get people off the couch.

©Joel Sartore NationalGeographic Photo Ark

“We have to get them to care about more than the price at the pump and what’s on television. We have to engage them and get them to meet these animals face-to-face. Most people live in cities now. They live out in the country. They’re never going to get the chance to see these things, unless they get involved somehow and look these animals right in the eye.

“How do we get there? I don’t know. Tick, tick, tick. Time’s running out, isn’t it?

“Can we do it? Absolutely we can. So far, most of what you’ve seen here tonight did not have to go away. It’s dying off for lack of attention. We just need to get this on the public’s radar screen. Have we done it before? You bet we have. We’ve done it many times. We’ve saved the giant panda so far. . . . We can do this. Absolutely. There’s no time to lose, though, is there. No time.

“I often get discouraged if I’m out in the field and I’m seeing the last of something and I think, ‘Holy cow, what am I going to do? How do I get people to care? Is it worth it?’ Absolutely.

“Margaret Mead once said so famously, ‘Never doubt that a small group of concerned can change the world.’”

There’s more, of course. Sartore’s world view — and it is truly a world view — is that this is a great time to be in conservation; there are a million things people can do. The elephant in the room is all of us. 

“I have three children . . . This is not happening to our grandchildren; it’s happening now.

“I'm just inspired to do all I can with the time I have on Earth, and I don't let it get me down. I just think, ‘Well, this one may go extinct, but we're going to tell its story everywhere we can.

“And try to encourage others to realize that these all have value, and that it's a tragedy to let anything else like this happen. Not to mention, it could really hurt humanity in the long run. We shouldn't be throwing away the other pieces of the puzzle before we know what they do.”

He knows the power of a good quip.

“How did I start out? Well, for me, I went to the University of Nebraska, where the ’n’ stands for . . . knowledge. That’s right.

“And I took pictures of things that I thought were interesting or different. Like a cowboy roping a cat. . . . I looked for the weird stuff.”

There is still time to turn things around or else he wouldn’t be putting so much time and effort into the Photo Ark.

The truth is that is to get a message across in a single photo is hard to do, he admits, but a single portrait photo, when it works, can work wonders.

“When people connect to animals through eye contact, we’ve got a real chance at changing human behaviour. That’s what we’re all about.

“Maybe that’s what an explorer does. We go out and find things that people don’t know about, and we bring it back.”

He knows the power of a good opening line.

“My name is Joel Sartore,” he said in a promotional video for the 2018 National Geographic Explorer of the Year Award — a line he often uses now to open his speaking engagements. “I’m a photographer, and my mission is pretty simple: To save life on Earth as we know it.”

Photo Ark debuts Saturday on NatGeo Wild at 10E/9C.

Personal, Poignant, Profound: David Attenborough Fine Tunes His Life’s Message in Netflix Autobiography

“Saving our planet is no longer a technological problem. It’s a communications challenge.”

— David Attenborough

Nearly 20 years ago to the day, when the world was less weary and planet Earth still seemed filled with boundless possibilities, the late CBS newsman Ed Bradley asked David Attenborough during a profile on 60 Minutes why his films focus exclusively on nature’s natural beauty, while seemingly skirting uncomfortable questions about human overpopulation, habitat loss, environmental ruin and a looming species extinction.

No one sitting at home, Attenborough replied, wants to be told the world is going to pieces, “and it’s all your fault.”

Now, in his early 90s, he has, if not changed his tune exactly, fine-tuned it. The climate emergency, burning wildfires and catastrophic flooding, coupled with a “storm of the century” seemingly every six months, have altered his thinking and reshaped his life’s message. He admitted once to his close personal friend and fellow environmental crusader Jane Goodall that he was depressed and wanted to step away, disappear from public life.

No, Goodall replied, in the gentle yet firm voice that has become her calling card: You mustn’t do that. Nature is resilient and it can endure — eventually — but for now the world needs your voice as an advocate for nature’s beauty. Your voice alone can reach millions — billions — of people, and cut across generations and cultures.

Re-energized, Attenborough vowed to continue the fight.

This was before climate change became a crisis, and then an emergency. This was before the northern white rhino in East Africa was whittled down to just two remaining animals, both females. This was before Greta Thunberg, and before the greatest loss of sea ice in the polar regions in human memory. Attenborough, 94, looked at Thunberg, 16, and his heart broke.

And so, the poignant, personal, profound Netflix documentary David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet is different. It is part autobiography, part allegory.

His biography is familiar enough to anyone who has followed his landmark programs over the decades: Planet Earth, Life, Blue Planet, Seven Worlds One Planet, Life on Earth — almost too many to count.

It’s the allegory part that drives him now, though. His thinking has changed, We can no longer afford to be complacent. We no longer have the moral luxury of being able to look away. Future generations are at stake. Not just the Siberian tigers, Amur leopards and Javan rhinoceroses he loves and cares so much about, but our children and grandchildren, and their children. This is serious, and the time for idle distractions — no matter how well-intended — has passed.

Enter Netflix.

Two years ago, Netflix backed the docuseries Our Planet against all reason and financial advice. The maker was disaffected nature-program producer Alastair Fothergill, who was instrumental in making Planet Earth, Blue Planet and Frozen Earth for BBC. Disheartened by being told by BBC executives at the time that he couldn’t talk about climate change or humans’ impact on planet Earth, Fothergill took his passion project about climate change and species extinction to Netflix.

Fothergill and other filmmakers had expressed growing unease — irritation, even — at having to make the nature programs they want to make with one hand tied behind their backs. 

Fothergill has said broadcasters need to be brave to tell disquieting stories of environmental loss — these are much harder conservation stories to tell. Stories without context don’t inspire us to change, after all. They encourage us instead to continue living our lives in a comfortable bubble, content to believe that someone else, somewhere else, will do something about it, and that all is well with the world.

Our Planet seemed an unlikely fit for a streaming service that had made its bones on solid, entertaining entertainment programs like House of Cards, Stranger Things and Orange is the New Black. And yet, somehow, it worked.

Our Planet needed a narrator, and Fothergill, with the program already filmed and edited by this point, turned to his old friend and former colleague Attenborough, assuming he would say no. Attenborough said yes.

And a remarkable thing happened. Jane Goodall was right. It’s possible that, with a different narrator, Our Planet would still have been seen by those already converted to the cause.

With Attenborough, though, Our Planet became a cause célèbre, a global talking point, thanks to Netflix’s worldwide reach. Netflix has since made Our Planet available in its entirety on YouTube, where anyone can see it.

Now, Attenborough has turned to the semi-autobiographical A Life on Our Planet, an exquisitely personal view of how our home planet has changed in the seven decades he has made nature programs, viewed through the prism of his own life, and through the cycle of life of all living beings on the planet.

To that end, for A Life on Our Planet Attenborough journeyed to coral reefs, to witness the deleterious effects of coral bleaching caused by global heating; to palm oil plantations in Borneo and the devastating effects those plantations are having on Southeast Asia’s critically endangered orangutang populations; to the site of the Chernobyl nuclear explosion in the Ukraine, and the strange, dark forest that has taken root around the long-since abandoned industrial landscape; to the boreal forests in Russia’s remote, northern Pacific Coast, home to the last remnant population of Siberian tigers; to high-tech food production farms in the Netherlands and a solar farm in Morocco, to highlight the energy waves of the future; and to the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, to bear witness to the annual wildebeest migration, one of nature’s remaining, most abiding natural glories.

This time he’s there in person, not just a narrator this time but our moral and spiritual guide to the planet as it is, not a romanticized version of what we want it to be. A Life on Our Planet is Attenborough’s personal witness statement for the natural world, and it is not to be missed. At age 94, he doesn’t have too many of these left.

“I’ve had the most extraordinary life,” he says simply, early in the film. “It’s only now that I appreciate how extraordinary.”

David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet debuts Sunday globally, on Netflix.

---



Imagine For 1 Minute

ImagineFor1Minute what a better future looks like. Is it a world where we respect and honor nature? Where no more species go extinct because of humanity's i...

Happy World Rhino Day

“The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there’s a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants.”

— David Attenborough

Cheat sheet: The first World Rhinoceros Day was celebrated throughout the world in 2010. The day was initiated by the World Wildlife Fund, as WWF was then called; the organizational body is now called the Worldwide Fund for Nature. For a time the acronym WWF was more closely associated in most people’s minds as the World Wrestling Federation. As the real WWF predated the wrestling federation, the wildlife conservation organization took the wrestling group to court for copyright/name infringement, aka misrepresentation. The wildlife group argued in court that, as fundraising is a crucial part of the WWF’s role in animal conservation, any association with a pro wrestling body could harm it in fundraising efforts. People are easily confused. Besides, the wildlife group got there first.

In the end, the wildlife body won its court case, surprising more than a few observers. The wrestling group has been rebranded as WWE — World Wrestling Entertainment — though, where entertainment is concerned, that’s a matter of opinion, is it not?

Of the various rhino species, Javan rhinos, Sumatran rhinos and black rhinos are classified as critically endangered by the International Union for  Conservation of Nature (IUCN). That’s why recent news reports of a pair of Javan rhino calves in the wild made news headlines around the world.

Realists know, however, that a pair of calves — while welcome news — is hardly a turning point in the species’ survival.

Other facts: Rhinos have poor eyesight, it is true.

That is compensated for by other senses: Rhinos can hear and smell over distances of up to 30 metres.

Rhinos enjoy a symbiotic relationship with oxpeckers. The oxpeckers stand on rhinos’ backs and feed on parasitic ticks. In exchange for a safe place to rest, not to mention the occasional light snack, oxpeckers raise the alarm when they sense danger, alerting their host to possible trouble. Rhinos do not have any natural enemies in the wild but, as with people, some species are known to be thoroughly unpleasant and are best avoided.  

Rhino horn is not ivory; it is made of keratin. Keratin is the same substance of which human hair and fingernails are made. Many people in China and Southeast Asia haven’t grasped that yet.

Rhinos mark their territory by defecating around themselves. Now you know.

A group of rhinos is called a crash, which is silly and absurd. Male rhinos are called bulls, while females are called cows. Calling a group of rhinos a crash is bullshit, as most people know, deep down.

The world is full of problems right now. Rhino survival is probably not at the top of many people’s lists of priorities. As with anything that old and majestic and fascinating, though, the world is better off with them than without them.

Happy World Rhino Day.

©CITES-Twitter

---

Old Bull Elephants Are No Longer Useful to Ellie Society and So Make Great Hunting Trophies, Right? Wrong.

“There are still plenty of questions to answer, but this research provides further evidence of the importance of these older bulls in elephant society.”

— Graeme Shannon, Bangor University (Wales), in the New York Times

And here we go again.

Trophy hunters are playing the conservation card again, saying that old bull elephants that are no longer useful for breeding are a waste of space. They chew up valuable and finite natural resources — literally — and guzzle dwindling supplies of fresh water that would be better served slaking the thirst of fat dentists from Minnesota, and other trophy hunters.

Old bull elephants are hoarders of ivory — they’re so greedy! — and they would make great keepsakes for the trophy wall, except that libtards, bunny huggers, socialist lefties — the worst kind — and big-city elites keep getting in the way.

By gunning down every old bull elephant in Africa, trophy hunters are doing the environment, and conservation, a favour. Why can’t people see that? Can’t a fat dentist from Minnesota catch a break in the media every once in a while?

How inconvenient, then, that new research, highlighted just days ago in the New York Times  — that socialist rag! — challenges the assumption that bulls become redundant in elephant society once their breeding years are behind them. Elephant matriarchs are vital to a herd’s survival, due to their vast repository of past knowledge — where to find water  in a drought, how to keep the babies away from marauding lions, where the best eating is to be found at any given time of year. While matriarchs are a valuable natural resource in their own right, old bulls were traditionally viewed as solitary loners, sullen, rude and uncommunicative. They have big tusks, though!

New evidence, the results of a study by the University of Exeter in the UK, published last Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Scientific Reports, suggests however that old bulls pass along vital information to younger bulls, not just life skills but about how to behave in polite society. It turns out that, as with human beings, there is no bigger idiot than a young male, and it takes the wisdom and maturity of age to show young ‘uns the way to a more responsible, fulfilled life.

Again, as with humans, young bulls are disinclined to listen to their female elders, but an old bull can lay down the law big-time, if it should have to come to that. Needs must.

That wailing sound you hear now is every trophy hunter in Africa moaning the fact that perhaps shooting every old bull elephant in Africa isn’t that good an idea after all.

“Little research has focused on male elephants,” writer Rachel Nuwer noted in the New York Times. “Males tend to roam across vast distances. This makes them difficult to track and observe.”

Studies have hinted, though, that there is more to males than is often assumed.

“For example, from 1992 to 1997, young orphaned male elephants that had been introduced to Pilanesberg National Park in South Africa began coming into premature musth, a temporary state of heightened aggression and sexual activity,” Nuwer continued. “When females rejected the adolescentsʼ advances, the young males took their aggression out on white rhinos, killing more than 40. Seeking a solution, researchers introduced six older male elephants to the park. The younger malesʼ musth subsided, and the rhino killing stopped.”

Older bulls tend to be targeted by both trophy hunters and poachers, because of their larger tusks. Trophy hunters have traditionally justified this by pointing out that older male elephants no longer serve any purpose to the family group. The new findings underscore the  consequences of removing the oldest, largest males from elephant populations.

If an old bull elephant were to write a book, in other words, it might well be titled, How to Behave and Succeed in Life. If a fat dentist from Minnesota were to write a book, on the other hand, it might be titled, How I Shot an Old Elephant on My Hunting Safari to Africa. Which one would you read?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/science/male-elephants-bulls.html

©Nel Botha-Pixabay

---