“The New Big 5 initiative is a beautiful, poignant reminder that all of nature and all of life is threatened on this planet. We are on this planet together. We must all do everything we can to care for the plants and critters that inhabit the Earth. Our future happiness depends on all of them.”
If he didn’t think there was hope, the World Press Photo Award-winning conservation photographer Steve Winter said in a podcast interview with New Big 5 founder Graeme Green, he would have walked away long before this.
Yes, these are dark times. Part of the whole point of the New Big 5 project, though — conservation photographers’ collective effort to recast the so-called Big Five of African wildlife, so named because early 20th-century big-game hunters judged them to be the five biggest, toughest animals to hunt for trophies and mount on the den wall — is to argue just that: There’s still room for hope, despite everything.
Ecotourism — seeing and photographing the world’s last remaining wild animals in their natural environment — is more cost-effective and leaves a softer footprint on the environment than the old way of doing things.
Yes, an impoverished community in Africa or Asia, or in the Americas for that matter, can make money from selling a hunting licence to kill an elephant, or a jaguar, but that’s a one-time-only payoff. A tourist who pays to see an elephant or a jaguar in the wild ensures that elephant or jaguar will be there the following day, for the next tourist to pay to see — and so on.
The New Big 5 project will name the five animals most desired by wildlife photographers — professionals and hobbyists alike. The decision is by public acclamation; results of the online write-in vote will be revealed later this year.
In the meantime, 10 of the world’s leading conservationists, behavioural scientists and nature photographers have weighed in on the New Big 5’s website about their reasons for hope — COVID-19, short-sighted politicians and rapacious land developers, self-absorbed trophy hunters and avaricious money-men be damned.
Jane Goodall, Chris Packham, Ami Vitale, Joel Sartore, and Art Wolfe are just a few, and it’s hard to listen to what they have to say without feeling at least a twinge of inspiration and motivation to leave behind a better world. (Full podcasts interviews with some of the most influential photographers in their field are accessible on iTunes and other media platforms, gratis.)
Vitale, who I’ve written about here before (https://www.amivitale.com; her images of game rangers trying to save the northern white rhino in the Ol Pejeta highlands near Mt Kenya are some of the most memorable conservation photos ever taken) is defiant in her belief that, no, it’s not over yet.
“Itʼs easy for people to watch television at home and think this world is a terrible, dark, scary place,” she posted on NewBig5.com. “But thatʼs not the world I know. There are incredible things happening. . . .
“People are smart. We can figure a lot of things out. . . . Weʼre the biggest destroyers, but weʼre also able to do great wondrous things. By going out and doing something, it gives you so much energy and you start to realize how much you can do. The power of one individual is real. I see it over and over in the stories I work on.”
Joel Sartore, recently profiled by 60 Minutes’ Bill Whitaker of CBS News, is equally determined.
Sartore is helming one of the most ambitious — and urgent — photography projects in the 132-year history of the National Geographic Society. He is in the process of taking a portrait image of every single remaining wildlife species on planet Earth, before many of them vanish forever. The Photo Ark, as it has been dubbed, is vital, meaningful and important work.
“A lot of animals Iʼve seen are likely to go extinct in my lifetime without anyone knowing they existed,” Sartore posted. “I donʼt ever get depressed,” he continued. “I just get fired up. I donʼt think about what the world is going to look like in a hundred years, or 50. I just think, ‘What can I do with my life that will maybe help?’
“I encourage people to think about what they can do. Pick something youʼre passionate about. It could be wildlife. It could be social issues. It could be the environment. . . . At the end of your days, you want to look in the mirror and . . . know you did what you could and you were part of the world.”
Africa’s wildlife has remained close to the heart of Virginia McKenna. McKenna, 88, was one of the lead actors in the 1966 film classic Born Free who became an ardent conservationist in her later years. It could be said McKenna and her late husband, actor Bill Travers, have done more to popularize the fate of lions in the world than anyone who ever lived, even the original conservationist husband-and-wife team, George Adamson and Joy Adamson, who lived the original life and wrote the original book.
McKenna has lived many lives in her years, and has seen the ushering in of the Greta Thunberg age in person. The New Big 5 could conceivably become more influential and more meaningful, to the future of the planet and to wildlife species themselves, than the Big 5 ever were.
“The original Big 5 were selected by trophy hunters as the species they’d most like to hang on their walls,” McKenna posted on the New Big 5’s website. “Society has changed and trophy hunting is on the way out — thank goodness. The New Big 5 is a wonderful project that’s about celebrating life, not death.”
And there you have it. Life, not death. Reason for hope.
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