Of Lost Worlds and “the Sistine Chapel of the Ancients”

“When you’re there, your emotions flow . . . We’re talking about several tens of thousands of paintings. It’s going to take generations to record them . . . Every turn you make, there’s a new wall of paintings. We started seeing animals that are now extinct. The pictures are so natural and so well made that we have few doubts that you’re looking at a horse, for example. The Ice-Age horse had a wild, heavy face. It’s so detailed, we can even see the horse hair. It’s fascinating.”

— Jose Iriarte, Professor of Archaeology and expedition leader, Exeter University (UK), in the Sunday Observer.

Two news events, seemingly unrelated. Serendipity in the jungle. The world of books. Rediscovery of a lost world. And a reminder that, for all the harrowing, depressing news of the past year, there are bigger stories out there still, stories that inspire wonder and thought, and stretch all the way back to the wandering times and the early origins of humankind.

Just days apart, a new edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s adventure classic The Lost World marked the first time Doyle’s original manuscript has been published in full, complete with handwritten notes and changes by the author, alongside a revealing, vintage photograph of the author dressed up as his central character, Professor Challenger, complete with false beard and bushy eyebrows.

The photograph — a mock-up of Conan Doyle and his friends posing as the Lost World’s imaginary expedition team members — has renewed speculation that Professor Challenger, the hero of not one but a series of Conan Doyle novels, was in fact the author’s favourite character, despite the fame and widespread acclaim of his most famous literary creation, Sherlock Holmes.

Loud, abrasive and larger than life, Professor Challenger was the character Conan Doyle aspired to most.

Or so the theory goes.

Conan Doyle spent much of his career distancing himself from his most famous creation, but was only too happy to be associated with what many literary historians now believe to be his literary alter ego.

The two certainly couldn’t be more different.

Where Holmes was introverted, patient and intellectual, measured in both thoughts and action, Professor Challenger lived life in the moment: compulsive, headstrong, irascible and forever looking for new worlds to discover. The Lost World, the first in the Challenger series, found the intrepid explorer leading a band of well-intended misfits deep into the jungles of South America, where they happen on a world of prehistoric creatures overlooked by the prying eyes of the outside world. The small band of explorers is faced with a dilemma: report what they’ve seen, and soak in the acclaim and adulation that would surely follow, or keep their find secret, so future explorers won’t spoil it. The Lost World was originally serialized in Strand Magazine in April,1912.

History doesn’t repeat itself so much as swirl around in unpredictable loops and curls.

©Marie-Claire Thomas-Wild Blue Media

Just days after SP Books’ publication of The Lost World’s full manuscript, word broke that a 13-km (eight mile) wall of prehistoric rock paintings has been discovered in the Amazon rainforest in Colombia. (The original Lost World is believed to have been inspired in part by Mount Roraima, a high, at-the-time rarely climbed, rain-deluged sandstone plateau in neighbouring Venezuela.) The Colombian rock art dates back some 12,500 years and includes depictions of animals long since extinct. The rock art, which some palaeoanthropologists are calling the “Sistine Chapel of the Ancients,”  was discovered last year by a Colombian-British expedition in Colombia’s Chiribiquete National Park, funded by the European Research Council. The finding was kept quiet until now, in part because a docuseries about the expedition, Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon, hosted by palaeoanthropologist and explorer Ella Al-Shamahi,  will air this month on Britain’s Channel 4. The dating of the rock art is based in part on the fact that many of the animals depicted are from the last Ice Age and include mastodons — extinct in South America since roughly 10,000 BC — palaeo-llamas, a distant ancestor of the modern-day camel, giant sloths and Ice Age horses.

The rock art also includes human handprints, which is instructive because indigenous tribes native to the Amazon are believed to be descendants of the early waves of human migrants from Siberia who crossed the Bering Land Bridge some 17,000 years ago. The indigenous Kayapo and Yanomami tribes of the Amazon have been native to the area for thousands of years. The first Western mention of the Yanomami dates back to 1759, during the time of the early Spanish explorers.

The rock paintings are deep in the heart of Colombia’s remote Serrania de la Lindosa region, one of the last properly explored regions on the South American continent. The research team had to reach the area on foot, often at night, in jungle overrun with caimans and venomous snakes. The area was only recently unsealed to outsiders because of the decades-long civil war between the Colombian government and FARC insurgents.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and the discovery of the “Sistine Chapel of the Ancients” — two events separated by 108 years of history.

Far from the madding crowd, the found world is every bit as fascinating as the lost world.

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Personal, Poignant, Occasionally Harrowing: Swedish Filmmaker Nathan Grossman On Making ‘I Am Greta’

“I hope that after seeing this movie, people find some extra respect for people who are different, people who have that style of saying what they think and pointing at problems instead of just shoving them under the carpet. We should embrace these people, because we need them to show what’s wrong.”

— Nathan Grossman, filmmaker, I Am Greta

Sometimes, the story you don’t see can be every bit as compelling as the story you do see.

I Am Greta, Swedish filmmaker Nathan Grossman’s absorbing and surprisingly intimate portrait of Greta Thunberg, makes its streaming debut Friday on Hulu. Grossman’s feature length, first-person documentary is a testament to the resilience and determination of a world-renowned — and somewhat reluctant — teenage climate activist.

It’s also, at its heart, a home video of a tightly knit family that deals with personal struggles on a day-to-day basis, and is unprepared and overwhelmed at times to be the focus of the white-hot glare of the global media spotlight.

Climate activists have been disappointed, some of them anyway, that Grossman’s film is more biography than a call to arms, but that is precisely what makes I Am Greta an eye-opening experience. It’s not the kind of climate film that has been made thousands of times before. It’s not about preaching to the converted, or winning new converts to the cause. It’s the story of a life, and in so doing its reach is universal. That’s one reason why I Am Greta drew such a warm response at last month’s international film festivals in Venice and Toronto. The consensus seemed to be: This is not what I was expecting, followed by, well, This is really, really not what I was expecting.

The story of how the film came together is another story, but also one worth telling. Grossman followed the young Thunberg, a shy 15-year-old, from the time she first staged her one-person protests outside the Swedish parliament, through her rising prominence as she became the leader of a global youth movement, and ends with her extraordinary wind-powered sail across the Atlantic Ocean by racing yacht, to speak at last September’s UN Climate Action Summit in New York City.

“A friend of mine had met the Thunberg family,” Grossman recalled, in a social-distancing interview with Hulu’s media arm. “They told him Greta was planning to do a sit-down strike to protest for the climate because she felt that no one was doing anything. The national election was coming up in Sweden and she wanted to show how important this issue was. We stayed in the background and thought we could shoot a day or two and see what happened.

“I saw her sitting by herself with a sign and asked if I could put a mic on her and follow

her for the day.

“ I told her, ‘Look, we don’t really know what to do with this. Maybe we can do a short (film), or maybe we can do a series on different child activists, and you can be one of them.’”

Things didn’t exactly work out that way, for either of them. Her life story — and the film — took on a life of its own.

“Things went so quickly,” Grossman recalled. “Just during that (one) day, people started to stop by and ask questions. She was very articulate. 

“After three weeks, she decided to continue past the election, striking every Friday. Suddenly, the movement was starting to spread to other parts of Sweden, then it was in Finland and Denmark. We had been filming for a month. I said I wanted to work with this full-time and see if it could be a piece about this movement and about her.”

Activism had always lied at the heart of Grossman’s early work as a filmmaker.

“I’m a documentary filmmaker and my background is in cinematography. During that first week I was so mesmerized by her expressions that I just wanted to take that camera from the tripod and sit with her on the street. So we started doing that, and we had more discussions. She was very shy, but I could understand that as long as we were discussing topics she was interested in, that was something that she wanted to do. I think she and her father figured that we had the same point-of-view and interest in climate change, and that was the beginning of our friendship.

“When they started to travel to other countries, I told them that I would like to come with them. I think they felt that I was a person who was easy to be with.”

From thew beginning, Grossman chose to leave a light footprint.

“The entire film is 99% shot by me, and I would say that the sound is 95% taken by me. I was just this one-man band. In the beginning there was no budget. Usually, when I start a project, I try not to bring in too many people. This took off so quickly, and I decided to keep shooting on my own, even though it got tough (at times) with so much going on, as the pace became quicker and quicker. It’s hard to be the director, sound technician, and cinematographer all in one.”

There were challenges along the way.

©Hulu/Nathan Grossman

“The first issue was trying to wrap my head around how I wanted to tell the story. In the beginning, it was so hard to know: Is Greta going to be a lead figure in this movement, or is this film going to be more about the movement? I solved that issue with the feeling that my camera was drawn towards Greta. She has this special perspective on the world. She wasn’t interested in always framing things nicely and being polite.

“Getting into these meetings with high-profile leaders was another challenge. The entire project was made without flying. I eventually did fly back home from the U.S. — one sailing trip over the Atlantic was enough). It took so much time traveling with them by electric car and train, often not knowing if I was even going to get into any events in the end.”

Grossman could not have anticipated that first sail.

“When she told me about her invitation to go to the U.S., I said that I’d love to go with her, because I felt like that would be an ultimate end to the story. We were so deep into the narrative, I wanted to have a camera on the boat. It wasn’t an easy decision for me to go with her, because it takes a few weeks sailing over and I know it would be rough. But even though I was scared of going, I felt like that was what the story deserved.

“Some moments aren’t easy to watch, like when Greta is having a tough time toward the end of the boat trip, or when she’s reading hateful comments made about her on social media.”

He thought it important to include those moments in the film, though.

“I’m impressed with Greta, but of course I needed to show the full spectrum of her activism, which is that there are bad days and there are good days. I felt this was a really important part of the story. I talked to Greta about that. 

“I said, “I need to be able to follow you guys when it’s not comfortable. Of course you can say, ‘We want you to stop shooting’ or ‘Leave the room.’” But I wanted to capture the fullness of how it feels being Greta and being an activist dealing with this very hard issue.”

Unsurprisingly, Thunberg had a surprising reaction when she first saw the film. 

“Her biggest reaction was she felt very weird seeing herself on screen, which I totally

understand. 

“She’s not doing this to become a celebrity; she’s doing it to tell the story of climate change and get her message out.

“Greta said to me once that she was afraid she wouldn’t recognize herself in the film, that I would make her into someone else. When she watched the film, she said she recognized herself. It was a pivotal moment hearing her say that. It felt like I had achieved what she hoped for, in the sense that the portrait of this crazy year was true to her.

“This isn’t as much a portrait of Greta, as it is a documentary about this crazy year that she had. It’s a movie which brings you into the eye of the storm. The way the influence of Greta and the youth climate movement grew in just one year is really quite crazy, and historic I think. So I’m happy to get to take the viewers with me on this journey, in the public and private sphere, in Sweden and in Europe, and on the Atlantic Ocean.

“I had to hunch my back for two years shooting the film because I wanted to be on Greta’s eye level. The point-of-view is hers, and it’s her own words. I’ve made it from her perspective as much as I’ve been able to.

“This film is more about Greta than climate change. As you see in the movie, she’s developed a lot during this year and opened up more. What Greta tells the world about change, I think, is that sometimes it’s good to see the world in black and white, because that’s how you can really see what’s uncomfortable.

“I hope that after seeing this movie, people find some extra respect for people who are different, people who have that way of saying what they think and pointing at problems instead of just shoving them under the carpet. We should embrace these people, because we need them to show what’s wrong.

The film highlights the growing gap between worsening climate impact and warnings from scientists on the one hand, and the words and actions of world leaders on the other. Greta and other young people demand a safe future and that leaders listen to the science. Instead they are met with empty words from politicians, and ridicule or even death threats from individuals. This is the source of so much of her frustration and I hope viewers will leave with a lot of that frustration as well.”

©Hulu/Nathan Grossman

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‘Virus Hunters’: Cautionary Tales from Wild Places

“I’ve been a journalist for 40 years — covered lots of different, huge events — but I must say I’ve never really seen anything like this. To watch this virus make its way across the planet, to watch it upend everybody’s life in one way or another, and to know we’re not even halfway close to solving it and there could be worse days to come, is really frightening. But what I think we need to do as journalists is encourage solution-based journalism, science-based journalism, and really push people to lean into that science and not get caught up in the politics behind it.”

— Susan Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief, National Geographic Magazine

As is often the case — even in cheaply made programs — there may be interesting people with interesting things to say behind the scenes and on the ground. Such is the case with Virus Hunters (debuting Sunday, National Geographic channel at 9E/8C).

Virus Hunters plays like an insipid special report on the local 6 o’clock news — phoning it in, literally at one point — but in a conference call earlier this summer with journalists from across the US and Canada, Chris Golden, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and epidemiologist, Jim Desmond, a wildlife veterinarian and founder of Liberia’s Chimpanzee Rescue & Protection NGO and Kendra Phelps, a field scientist at the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance who specializes in bats, shared their experiences and offered their thoughts about where we’re headed next, and what’s happening on the ground right now. It’s a sobering picture.

Here’s some of what they had to say.

• Desmond on chimpanzees, long thought to be a spreader of zoonotic viruses. Think Ebola:

“Wild chimpanzees part of the ecosystem here in Liberia, but they're hunted for bush meat. There's a big— both internal and external — bush-meat trade here in Liberia and throughout West Africa. So part of our job at Liberia Chimpanzee Rescue & Protection is to help law enforcement enforce the wildlife protection laws to try to stop killing wildlife that then ends up the (human food) chain, where people can be exposed to potentially dangerous pathogens from the different wildlife that they might be catching and killing. By protecting the chimps — and chimps are a very charismatic species; they're very important to the ecosystem itself — and helping enforce wildlife protection laws, we are not only protecting chimps, we’re also protecting other animals that share the forest with the chimps.

• Phelps on how to mitigate future zoonotic viruses and prevent them from morphing into fully fledged pandemics:

“It’s entirely about how we interact with the environment, how we treat other species that coexist with us in that environment. A healthy environment equals healthy animals equals healthy humans. By taking care of the environment, including wildlife species, and keeping those species separate from human populations

is one way we can prevent the next spillover, such as the transfer of bats into human populations.

• Golden on the big picture:

“Even on a broader level, if we’re thinking about the ways in which humans are impacting nearly every ecosystem around the world — everything from deforestation to sea-level rise to rapid urbanization, all the multiple ways in which the environment is changing — environmental changes are having devastating impact, not only on people but also on wildlife. When we damage wildlife and cause them further stress, it creates more opportunities for viral transmission. By doubling down and really focusing our conservation efforts on issues of wildlife trade and the increase in human-wildlife interaction, we can possibly prevent the next pandemic from happening in the first place.”

• But wait, theres more:

“One of the key words in that question,” Desmond added, “is ‘mitigate.’ What we’re all trying to do with this kind of work . . . mitigate the risks. By changing human behaviour that creates further risk of these pandemics from breaking out through wildlife, the better we can protect all people.

“The way to solve this is not to villainize animals. The way to solve this is realizing that we must encourage and emphasize conservation efforts. By preserving and creating healthy, natural eco-systems, in which these animals can thrive in the absence of human encroachment and interaction, we can maintain a healthy ecosystem and a healthy human population simultaneously.”

Desmond is not fond of the way science has been politicized. “I've worked in many, many countries around the world with different scientists, and one of the great things about science is that people who work in the field want to try and answer important questions about the way the world works. The people I’ve met in the field work together, regardless of culture or ethnicity or background. They just want to do the work.

“If we listen to scientists, if we try to understand what's going on and try to answer these questions — scientists aren't always going to get it right — we can get closer to doing the right thing. When it becomes political, the message can be lost.”

Follow the science, in other words, and listen to the scientists.

©Daniel Hollis-National Geographic/Liberia Chimpanzee Rescue & Protection

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A Glimmer of Hope: Emerging from the Ashes of the Australian Bushfires

“When we first started making this film, it was mid-March, when we all stopped going to the office and were dealing with the pandemic. The news around us was so horrible and grim, and so we thought: Let’s try to make something uplifting.”

— Fred Kaufman, executive producer, PBS Nature

After the fires, there was a glimmer of hope.

Only a glimmer, mind, but there it was: A patch of green where Adrina Selles’ home still stood, surrounded by the blackened devastation of January’s wildfires that ravaged vast tracts of wilderness across Australia’s state of New South Wales. A now semi-retired nurse, Selles had opened a homegrown wildlife care centre several years earlier, little thinking that one day she would be in the centre of a firestorm — literally — and yet now there she was. 

This Wednesday, on an hour-long documentary on US public broadcasting’s PBS Nature showcase (Australian Bushfire Rescue, Weds. 8E/7P), science filmmaker Anja Taylor takes viewers on a personal journey through Selles’ story as she tries — and in some cases succeeds — nurturing wombats, wallabies, kangaroos and other wild animals badly injured in the bushfires back to health. The idea is that, eventually, the animals may be released back into the wild, or what’s left of it.

It’s an affecting program that shows that while one person can only do so much, it can still make an important difference to making this a better world. The program, although scheduled months ago, could not be better timed. Fierce wildfires are once again ravaging large tracts of wilderness area across the US West, even as climate deniers insist it’s all some kind of hoax  driven my a Machiavellian desire to kill the oil and gas industry and create fake jobs in green energy projects that conservative right-leaning climate deniers insist are government featherbedding schemes.

The number of animals killed in the fires — in both far-flung US and Australia — is estimated in the billions, not tens or even hundreds of millions. This is no hoax.

Australian Bushfire Rescue focuses on Selles’ animal sanctuary and her rehabilitation efforts in the immediate aftermath of the fires. Her home doubles as a centre for rehabilitating injured and orphaned animals for eventual release back into the wild.

It was miraculously spared from the fires that swept through the area on New Year's Eve, and went on to serve as an emergency hub for rescue volunteers and vets. Since the fires, local and international support for Selles’ sanctuary has resulted in new enclosures, including a new triage centre for wildlife. Selles now has around 40 wallabies and kangaroos in her care.

The program itself is an encouraging glimpse into human resilience, and the humanity that reveals itself through catastrophe. The program gives one hope for the future, something we can agree we all need a little bit more of these days.

In a Zoom conference call with TV critics this past summer, Selles spoke at length — despite it being 6am local time Down Under — about her experience and her memories of those fateful days. This is not the first time wildfires have ravaged wilderness in Australia, and it will not be the last, just  as wildfires are devastating the US West right now. This will happen again, and the very thought angers her.

“Going through the fires and these kinds of emergency situations really highlights everything and teaches you about the care and the needs of these little guys,” Selles said during the Zoom call. “It makes you more aware of their needs and environmental needs, what these animals hear and what they  see, the disasters like the fires and floods and everything else. It highlights everything. Things like: what are we doing? What are we doing to our environment? What are we doing to these animals? Makes you question a lot of things.”

Selles said she learned a lot about herself during the experience.

“It’s funny how, at times, even though you feel your energy draining away, you have other people you can rely on. Somehow, with all the people working there, there's an understanding of the support that comes out, not only the physical support, but the emotional support that everyone gives to each other.

Adrina Selles ©Anja Taylor/WildBear Entertainment

“The wombat and the joeys surviving was just amazing. That was the respite.  We had one little joey come in the middle of that devastation. Every kangaroo was burnt. But this little joey was perfect, its feet were beautiful, not a mark on it.  Somehow that little joey became our mascot.

“People needed respite, so they would go and say, ‘Okay, it’s my turn to feed this joey.’ And they would look after it. There was another one, and then another one. They kept coming in.

“I have a group of volunteers that come in and help, and they are a really good team. They are out here all the time because I live there. They  understand that. They will say, “Okay, it's time. You got to go away. You have to go on to something else and we'll do this. We'll take over.’ There's a kind informal backup.”

This isn’t about keeping house pets. The animals will have to be released eventually. At least, that’s the hope.

“That's where the carers need to be trained to go through that process. In the beginning, obviously, when the animals are (injured), they’re handled quite frequently. As they get bigger, we step back more and more, to prepare them for release, to the point where we might be in their enclosures only once a day.

“We have a couple of ways of releasing, some of which what we call a hard release. They have to be a bit older and have more weight on them. The hard release is, we just put them out there and push, and hopefully they have enough skills and weight on them and things like that so that they are going to survive.

“The other option is a soft release, where you — I can just open the gates at my property and they'll go as they please, and I support them. They slowly take their time. They do. They return to the wild. 

“They won't actually let you touch them anymore. After a while, they’re only coming for food.

“They’re only coming for food; they are not coming for you anymore. They make that break themselves.

“Especially the boys, they leave and go elsewhere.  Some of the girls will stay around. They’re only coming around for food, though. If I stopped feeding them, I wouldn't see them anymore.”

Veteran Nature executive producer Fred Kaufman — the program has been on the air for 39 seasons now — says the decision to produce Australian Bushfire Rescue was a no-brainer, even given the competition from other ideas for natural history programs. Especially now, during these trying times.

“There’s a very poignant scene in the film where the carers are out there and a mother kangaroo is trying to care for two young ones,” Kaufman recalled. “The mother was really very injured and she would not have survived. That kangaroo had to be put down.

“One of the keepers, rehabilitators, goes back to his truck and he gets a rifle and he shoots the kangaroo. We just had to take that out of the program. Even though every care was taken to put her out of her misery, it's just too hard to watch. We just couldn't go with it. But we made the point that that particular kangaroo had to be put down.

“While making this film, I really wanted us to highlight the work of Adrina and so many others caring for these animals, because it is very grim and the footage can be very disturbing and very hard to watch, and yet the work that the carers do, rehabilitating the animals and caring for them, just gives us all hope.

“When we first started making this film, it was mid-March, when we all stopped going to the office and were dealing with the pandemic. The news around us was so horrible and grim, and so we thought: Let's try to make something uplifting.”

Australian Bushfire Rescue airs Wednesday in the US and Canada on PBS at 8E/7C.

©Anja Taylor-WildBear Entertainment

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From the Trenches: When Is It Not Okay to Pose a Semi-Naked Model in Front of a Wild Elephant?

“Any photographer covering issues of wildlife and conservation who puts their ego and commercial interest in front of those of their subject needs to seriously consider their motives.”

— Charlie Hamilton James

It seems simple enough. Pick up a camera, find an animal, focus on the eyes, and take a  picture.

And yet.

Controversies dog nature photography, from staged photos to animals being photographed in captivity — captured, if you will — and being passed off as wild, to, famously, a stuffed anteater being passed off as the real thing and winning one of the most prestigious wildlife photography awards on the planet, only to have the awards committee claw the award back when the secret is revealed and the perpetrator outed as a fraud.

Some prominent nature photographers attract controversy more than others — serial offenders, if you will — and hardly a month goes by without some behind-the-scenes dust-up or other landing headlines in the mainstream media.

That’s especially true this time of year, during October awards season, when wildlife photography is in the public eye, thanks to shout-outs from mainstream media outlets as widespread and diverse as BBC and The Guardian to CNN, the South China Morning Post and Canada’s public broadcaster, CBC.

Enter David Yarrow. One of the genre’s most popular and successful luminaries in the wildlife photography field is in the frame — again — for “turning wildlife into an accessory,” as the photography news website Fstoppers put it. 

Like his style or hate it — and there are vocal voices on both sides of the philosophical divide — he is a star in a crowded community. Yarrow commands big prices for his work, and can call on his friends and colleagues in New York and London fashion scenes, to fill out his wildlife portraits with everything from scantily clad supermodels to guaranteed exposure on the breakfast-TV circuit on two continents. Yarrow has openly invested much of his time and energy into fundraising for various wildlife charities and NGOs, no small consideration when fundraising and financing conservation efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic has become easier said than done.

Yarrow calls himself a fine-art photographer, not a wildlife photographer.

Ethics are ethics, though, and Yarrow’s practices don’t sit well with many nature photographers. They don’t care for triggering animals to get a reaction, or using captive game farms for posed shots, game farms that have a reputation for mistreating their animals once the cameras go away. Think Tiger King crossed with Vogue.

The simmering controversy boiled over yet again recently, after Yarrow photographed one

of the most famous, iconic tuskers on location in Amboseli, Kenya, framed by a topless model.

Yarrow has posted actively on social media to say that photographing wild animals in Africa has never been more rewarding for the photographer than right now, when crowds of tourists are thin-on-the-ground owing to Covid-19 travel restrictions.

Yarrow’s elephant shoot drew the ire of the NGO Saving the Wild, however, and members of the International League of Conservation Photographers, a member organization of professional photographers who put ethics before results.

National Geographic photographer Charlie Hamilton James likens Yarrow and photographers like him being more “ego-warriors” than eco-warriors.

“The term encapsulates not just the way these people approach their subjects, but also how they cast and caption their work,” James has said.

The issue isn’t limited to just one famous photographer and his work in high-end glossy magazines and collectible coffee-table books— it’s a global, worldwide problem.
One photographer-guide who runs expeditions out of Churchill, Manitoba told Fstoppers he won’t accept clients who won’t play by the accepted rules of conduct during his ground-based expeditions to see the area’s polar bears as they congregate around the town, waiting for the sea ice to freeze in Hudson Bay.

Yarrow for his part has been contrite, saying in a joint statement this past week that  he unintentionally “put the message out there that it’s okay to get out of a vehicle to be in close range with a wild animal, and it’s not. That is when things can go dangerously wrong.

“I have a responsibility to convey that these were exceptional circumstances, with rangers present, and my narrative should have made that explicitly clear.”

Saving the Wild, the NGO that helped organize the photo shoot and who went public with their misgivings once the shoot unfolded not as they expected, noted that if a wild animal like an elephant caused someone harm during a photo shoot, regardless of whether that elephant was provoked or not, it would be put down, defeating the whole purpose behind the conservation message.

“It’s not philanthropy when animals have to suffer for the charity to benefit.”

The Latin name for elephant is Loxodonta africana, by the way, not Victima fashionista.

©Saving the Wild/Facebook