“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
The cycle of life goes on, in the wilderness. Look closely, though, and you’ll notice that In the background, ecotourism and the relatively small community of wildlife photographers have gone quiet. The long rains are dissipating in the world-famous — and heavily trammelled — Maasai Mara in the Mara-Serengeti ecosystem but, this time, when the wildebeest migration passes through the dusty plains during the dry tourist season of July through October, visitors will be notable by their absence.
The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and attendant travel warnings and societal lockdowns has led to an inevitable spate of poaching, as desperate people resort to desperate measures to feed themselves and their families.
The calculated, clear-headed view — to anyone who’s willing to read the science — is that the old world order, economically and financially, won’t return for five years. If at all.
Nature and wildlife photographers are staying close to their home bases, looking inward, going over old archival files and thinking outside-the-box to come up with new creative projects. Today, most traditional galleries remain in lockdown, starved of visitors and starved of conversation, except online, where the conversation has rarely, if ever, been livelier.
The New Big 5 — a modern-day reworking of the traditional Big Five of big-game hunting in Africa, a concept that hit its peak in the early 1900s and has been losing public favour ever since — is a case in point. No one would begrudge the lion, the elephant, the rhino, the cape buffalo or the leopard their rightful in the canon of wildlife photography, hunting or no hunting.
These are complex times, though, and the very best of nature photography has always focused on issues rather than aesthetics — images with deeper meaning than mere pretty pictures. Conservation photography, of the kind practiced by Cristina Mittermeier, Nick Brandt, Steve Winter and combat-photographer and photojournalist Brent Stirton, is the new calling.
A looming mass extinction — it will be the planet’s sixth, the first human-made and already dubbed the Holocene or Anthropocene extinction — has inspired renewed energy and human inventiveness among those who have vowed to spread the message through photography, whether it’s a polar bear trying to find food on an ever-shrinking ice cap or a dead rhino with it’s horn chainsawed off to feed the lucrative black market in traditional medicine. (Despite its debatable properties, and they are debatable, keratin, the
primary substance of rhino horn, is not a cure for cancer, nor a reliable treatment for Covid-19, but that hasn’t stopped the black market from taking after it like a Sinaloan drug cartel onto a less costly, more profitable mix of marching powder.
If I were to choose my own New Big 5, I would focus on those animals that are both iconic and recognizable to the public at large, to better and more effectively promote the message of conservation not just to Europe and North America but around the world. My newly revised Big 5 would feature the lion, the tiger, the elephant, the polar bear and the mountain gorilla.
The New Big 5 project itself (visitors to newbig5.com can choose their own picks) is encouraging people to think more creatively, not by focusing only on the sublime and the beautiful but on the overlooked and taken-for-granted, to find a deeper meaning. The world’s remaining wild places, and the wildlife within, are those that fill us with wonder and gratitude for the beauty which has been created from nature. Philosophers of the digital age have written of the power of the photograph to reach beyond the formality of technological reproduction to evoke in the viewer feelings of genuine emotion: anger at what we’re doing to the natural world, and hope for a better, wiser future.
If asked to look beyond the obvious — as much as I grew up admiring lions and tigers and elephants and polar bears — and compelled to choose five lesser-known animals that represent the issues and concerns facing species survival in the early 21st century, in the Age of Covid, my New Big 5 would look somewhat different than the norm.
I would focus, in no particular order, on the pangolin, the African hunting dog (aka painted wolf), the red colobus monkey, the honey badger (or its northern equivalent, the wolverine), and the ring-tailed lemur.
Luminaries who have weighed in on their own personal picks for a New Big 5 include Djimon Hounsou, Joanna Lumley, Virginia McKenna, Jane Goodall and Moby, whose eclectic and highly original picks include the coyote, the bobcat, the rattlesnake, the black bear and the common, ordinary, everyday rabbit, a favourite of children’s literature and arguably one of the most taken-for-granted animals on the planet.
Perhaps that’s the point.
Choose your own, at newbig5.com. Results will be revealed later in the year, pandemic or no pandemic, lockdown or no lockdown.
©Alex Strachan