Hardly anyone seeing the awarded images in this past weekend’s World Press Photo 2018 Awards could walk away without feeling shaken and, deep down, at least a little stirred.

No written summation of the winning images would be complete without the images themselves. That’s the whole point of photojournalism, in which the image truly is worth a thousand words. Good photography transcends different languages and cultures, which is why Mexico City-based photographer Ronaldo Schemidt’s image of a protestor set ablaze during street demonstrations last May in Caracas, Venezuela is so wrenching. It’s the kind of image no one wants to see, and yet it’s an image that’s impossible to tear one’s eyes away. The World Press Photo association awarded Schemidt the group’s Photo of the Year award for 2018, as well as 1st prize for spot news.

Schemidt’s image, taken for Agence France-Presse (AFP), is undeniably powerful, but it was just one among many.

©Ronaldo Schemidt/Agence France-Presse (AFP)

Charlottesville, Va. local-news photographer Ryan M. Kelly, a staff photographer for The Daily Progress local newspaper — the only daily newspaper in Charlottesville — won 2nd prize for spot news for his harrowing image of a 20-year-oldwhite supremacist and neo-Nazi, now charged with first-degree murder, ramming his car through a crowd of demonstrators at the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in the Virginia city last August.

@Ryan Kelly/The Daily Progress (Charlottesville, Va.)

It’s a sign of these troubled times for the planet, though, that the organizers of the 61st World Press Photo Awards saw fit to make room for separate environment and nature categories, where they joined such traditional news categories as contemporary issues, general news, long-term projects, people, sports and spot news.

North Carolina-born, Montana-based Ami Vitale, profiled in this space just a few weeks ago, won 1st prize in the nature/stories category for her photo essay “Warriors Who Once Feared Elephants Now Protect Them,” about the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in Samburu, northern Kenya, for National Geographic.

http://www.amivitale.com/2017/07/warriors-who-once-feared-elephants-now-protect-them/

It was a good week — a good year, in fact — for South African-based image-makers.

German-born Thomas P. Peschak, a trained marine biologist who moved to South Africa and switched careers to “document the beauty and fragility of our oceans,” won no fewer than four World Press Photo awards, all of them for National Geographic.

Peschak won both 2nd and 3rd prize in the nature/singles category, for his image of rockhopper penguins doing just that (2nd place), and an image juxtaposing a historic photo of an African penguin colony, taken in the late 1890s, against an image taken in 2017, showing the stark contrast in declining numbers between the two. (“Singles” are standalone images; “stories” are photo essays, in which a series of images tells a single story.)

Peschak won 2nd prize in the environment/singles category for his sobering image of a South African Antarctic Territory juvenile grey-headed albatross recovering from an attack by an invasive mouse species. He won 3rd prize in the nature/stories category — the same category in which his fellow National Geographic photographer Vitale won — for his haunting photo essay of the Galapagos archipelago.

Peschak switched to photojournalism, he says now, when he realized his images could do more for conservation than simply curating scientific statistics for academics (https://www.thomaspeschak.com).

Alaska commercial fisherman and occasional photographer Corey Arnold won 1st prize in the nature/singles category, for his equally sad image of a bald eagle picking over meat scraps in a garbage dumpster in Dutch Harbour, Alaska.

Top prize in the environment/singles category was awarded to South African conservation photographer Neil Aldridge for his unspeakably sad image of a southern white rhino, drugged and blindfolded during relocation to the Okavango Delta, Botswana from its home in South Africa, to protect it from poachers.

Photography is both a calling and a profession for Aldridge; he’s a lecturer in marine and natural history photography at Falmouth University, in Cornwall, in the UK, and runs workshops, expeditions and seminars, and in 2016 established the self-explanatory NGO Rhino Conservation Botswana.

“Photography is more than just a beautiful picture, a moment frozen in time; it has the power to transform our relationship with the world around us for the better,” Aldridge explains on his website at,

www.conservationphotojournalism.com.

A compelling image is about forging an emotional connection with the viewer, he says; the aim is to create stories that inspire positive change through the conservation of nature and the environment.

“I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose,” W. Eugene Smith famously said.

“The ability to keep things in perspective is very important for a journalist. In a tense situation you need the ability to be there, yet somehow step aside; to keep a cool head and keep working without getting frustrated.” — Philip Jones Griffiths.

“It’s a lot more than clicking the shutter. It’s the ideas, it’s the visual voice, it’s the telling the story, it’s kind of going beyond that initial things that just means you happened to be there at the right time.” — Ron Haviv.

“I think of myself as a journalist who chooses the art of photography to bring awareness to the world. Art is a powerful means of expression, but combined with journalism it has the ability to bring awareness to issues that can elevate understanding and compassion. It’s the basic reality of why I do what I do.” — Renée C. Byer.

“As photojournalists, we supply information to a world that is overwhelmed with preoccupations and full of people who need the company of images. We pass judgment on what we see, and this involves an enormous responsibility.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Here, then, without further ado, are the winners I’ve mentioned, with the primary emphasis — given the tone of this site — on matters involving nature and the environment.

https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/2018

NEIL ALDRIDGE

THOMAS P. PESCHAK

AMI VITALE

One of the perils of growing old, the respected novelist and essayist Paul Theroux wrote in his Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, is hearing the same old arguments over and over again from younger people who believe they were the first to think fo that argument.

To anyone on the ground with a working knowledge of the campaign to save endangered wildlife, a wearily familiar — and thoroughly discredited — old saw goes like this:

Trophy hunting is good for conservation, because it generates much-needed revenue to finance anti-poaching efforts.

It’s quite all right for a fat American dentist to shoot Cecil the Lion for the trophy wall, because the fee and costs he paid will go toward saving other lions.

Leaving aside the fact that in all probability not one Zimbabwe dollar — or American dollar for that matter — was ploughed back into lion conservation, it’s a bogus argument from top to bottom. The licence fee for a trophy bull elephant in Zimbabwe is USD $20,000; that same fee for an elephant in South Africa with tusks weighing over 50 lbs. is USD $50,000, not counting mandatory daily safari costs and the official daily rate per hunter and attendant trackers and camp staff.

Here’s where common sense trumps the financial-incentive argument, though — common sense over common cents, if you will.

An elephant shot for its ivory, or to be mounted on the wall of the family den back in the good state of Minnesota, or wherever, is a one-off in terms of revenue, even if that revenue was being put back into conservation, which it isn’t.

Tourism, though — much maligned by trophy hunters as a pastime for weaklings, losers and snowflakes — generates income, and jobs, day after day, for as long as the animal(s) in question stays alive in the wild.

That fat American dentist got his money’s worth out of Cecil the lion — arguably — but who knows how much money would still be generated today, right now, if Cecil were still alive, still there to show off his pride to tourists willing to pay USD $500 a night in some cases for the privilege of staying in a lodge within driving distance of lion territory. Botswana is the most expensive travel destination in Africa by far, in part because, unlike Kenya, Tanzania and even South Africa, Botswana’s national government made a conscious decision to cater to an elite few who can afford the exorbitant cost of a safari in the Okavango Delta, Chobe National Park and Moremi Game Reserve. in the theory that small numbers of well-paying visitors leave less of an imprint on a fragile environment than a mob of backpackers flocking to the Amboseli, Maasai Mara and Serengeti on the cheap, in East Africa.

Even in the Mara, though, where many of the local area conservancies are owned, managed and maintained by local Maasai stakeholders, even high-volume tourism is preferable to letting fat American dentists shoot every lion they see, no matter how high a licence fee they may be willing to pay.

That’s why Botswana President Ian Khama’s announcement late last week that Donald Trump’s decision to reverse his proposed ban on the import of big-game trophies, such as lions and elephants, will encourage more poaching, not less.

The reason legal hunting encourages illegal hunting doesn’t have so much to do with hunting itself as it does the market. Legal trophy hunting boosts the demand for legitimate ivory and lion trophies, which in turn feeds the market for illegal hunting. Since hardly anyone — not even a forensic pathologist or wildlife biologist — can tell the difference between legal ivory and that which has been harvested illegally, it doesn’t much matter where it came from, since no one can prove it anyway.

Only by closing down the market can the demand be controlled and eventually eliminated entirely.

And there’s no better way to shut down a market than to ban the importation of whatever it is people are trying to import, where it’s a lion head, elephant tusks or Bolivian marching powder.

If a fat American dentist shoots a trophy lion, but is unable to take that trophy home to show off to his friends and brag about what a He-Man he is, he’s unlikely to want to shoot that lion in the first place, especially at those prices ($25,000+, not including travel costs and mandatory daily fees and camp costs, not to mention tips for the staff).

Khama, speaking this past weekend at an anti-poaching summit in Kasane, Botswana, pointed out that Botswana banned hunting entirely some time ago, but that it is still legal in countries like Tanzania, Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. (Hunting has also been banned in Kenya, which has on occasion fed cross-border tensions between Kenya and neighbouring Tanzania,)

Khama said Trump’s overturning the US ban on the import of hunting trophies would only fuel poaching in his home country of Botswana. There has been a dramatic spike in poaching across Africa over the past 18 months, driven almost wholly by insatiable demand in Southeast Asia, China and, yes, the U.S. for elephant ivory and rhino horn.

Khama didn’t stop at trophy hunting, where Trump was concerned. He told the BBC that he was concerned about Trump’s “attitude toward the whole planet,” not just the import of hunting trophies.

The situation facing elephants is grave, despite the worldwide campaign by environmentalists, ecologists, conservationists, wildlife biologists and ordinary, everyday working people who want their children and grandchildren to possibly be able to see an elephant in the wild one day. Mike Chase, director of the conservation agency Elephants Without Borders, said at that same conference that he believes the worst of the poaching crisis is not yet over.

Botswana aside, Chase told delegates, “The political will to address these issues is not there, unfortunately.

“It has been in Botswana. And if our neighbours can learn from Botswana’s example, it will go a long way toward addressing this crisis.”

Despite the old, discredited argument that trophy hunting aids conservation efforts financially, the bottom line remains the bottom line: A lion or elephant is worth more alive, in terms of jobs, income and education opportunities to local communities in rural Africa, than it is dead.

Even a fat American dentist should be able to figure that out.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/campaigns/GiantsClub/donald-trump-encouraging-poachers-a8260776.html

Journal

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen