PBS

A breath of fresh air for Earth Day: Pristine, pure air discovered over the Amazon Rain Basin.

April 21, 2019

Earth Day beckons. The worldwide Extinction Rebellion protests continue, despite concerted efforts to silence them. Sir David Attenborough, 92, and Greta Thunberg, 16, have been passionate, and prominent, speakers for our threatened and increasingly fragile natural world, and the endangered species who cannot speak for themselves.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the powers-that-be — the world’s major financial institutions, the oil- and gas industry and government policymakers — are going to pay lip service, and no more than that, to the idea that our children and grandchildren’s future is finished unless something is done, and done now, about our increasingly evident climate emergency.

These past few days, on the same weekend an exhausted, disoriented polar bear wandered into the isolated village of Tilichiki on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsular, having floated some 700 km (450 miles) away from its home in the Arctic Circle on an ice floe, there was a remarkable discovery in the faraway Amazon rainforest.

The discovery was actually made a while ago, but has only now come to light following reports on BBC’s World News service and PBS News Hour in the US: Researchers from Washington State’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found a baseline of pure, pristine air over the Amazon, and is using it to show how we’re messing with climate, by comparing the pristine air to samples of “dirtied” air taken not so far away, over remote jungle towns and logging camps that are expanding rapidly throughout an area dubbed “the lungs of the Earth.”

A team of researchers discovered the pristine air — air that dates back to pre-Industrial times — by flying a specially fitted Gulfstream jet with specialized instruments designed to identify and record particles of air virtually unchanged since before Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Lost World.

The Amazon rainforest covers some 6 million square km (2 million square miles) of the South American landmass. It produces so much carbon — and produces so much life-giving oxygen — that it is truly the last, best hope for humankind, and for planet Earth.

And yet, the city of Manaus, Brazil — population 2 million — lies in the heart of the rainforest, with all the overcrowding, environmental destruction and deleted natural resources that come with a city of that size.

This is the classic good-news/bad-news story. The good news is that, on this Earth Day, there remains at least one place on Earth where the air survives as if the human footprint had never happened. The bad news is that the researchers have discovered that human pollution is driving the acceleration of climate-changing particles — aerosols — much more quickly than previously thought. These particles are not just a driver of climate change. They can cause heart disease and damage our lungs and other organs, not just in the immediate area but halfway around the world.

The researchers’ results were published in the journal Nature Communications.

If there’s any good news in all this, it’s that science now has a baseline to create a new standard of what clean, pure air on Earth is supposed to be, and can be if we apply enough effort, energy and human brain power to solving our climate crisis.

As one of the lead researchers told PBS’s Seattle TV affiliate KCTS-9, “We can (now) look back at the Amazon and see how much we’ve been changing it, and how much we will continue to change it (if we don’t do something soon).”

The die is not cast — yet. But it’s getting closer. The urgency is real, and people need to know the truth.

https://phys.org/news/2019-03-uncommon-valuable-pristine-air-reveal.html

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/19/extinction-rebellion-may-be-our-last-chance

‘The World’s Most Wanted Animal’ eye-opening, heart-rending — and urgent.

May 20, 2018

Cute — but doomed. That, at least, was the gist of a cranky review in The Independent of the BBC Two TV special Pangolins: The World’s Most Animal last week. “I’m not sure how many more wildlife documentaries along the lines of World’s Most Wanted I can cope with,” The Independent’s Sean O’Grady wrote, no doubt keeping in tune with his publication’s stated penchant for, erm, independent thinking.

“This sub-genre conforms to a template roughly as follows,” O’Grady continued: “Sir David Attenborough narrates; attention is focused on an endearing critically endangered creature; but also on some plucky humans trying to save them from extinction; heart-rending scenes of the human conservationist encountering the bagged-up corpses of their smuggled favourite creature at some airport terminal, usually in East Asia; plus, at the end, some scant hope represented by the work of the hopelessly underfunded endangered species reserve.”

But wait, there’s more.

“I was sort of ready for the pangolin to get the usual moving treatment, and sympathetically so, but, as I say, it’s just so overwhelmingly depressing and the battle to save these creatures so plainly unwinnable I feel like just letting the poachers get on with it and save us all more upset.”

Alrighty, then! Plainly, this is not the kind of program where a grinning, exquisitely coifed Jim Carrey is going to pop up as Ace Ventura, animal detective, pulling Courteney Cox, Sean Young and former Miami Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino in tow behind him. (For the record, it’s worth noting that the movie Ace Ventura: Pet Detective received “generally unfavourable reviews” from the critics when it was released in theatres in midwinter in 1994; made for $15 million, it went on to gross $107 million worldwide, proving that, while critics talk a good game, their opinion is often worthless.)

This is instructive because Pangolins: The Most Wanted Animal gets its North American debut this week, Wednesday on PBS, as the season finale of Nature — now in its, and I’m not making this up, 36th season. Nature’s 500-plus episodes puts it in the same league as The Simpsons, where longevity is concerned. Nature bowed in 1982; The Simpsons bowed in 1989. Pangolins may be doomed, but if they are, they’re not about to pass by unnoticed.

And when a writer for The Independent ends by saying, “Sorry, pangolins, elephants, rhinos, orang-utans, gorillas, pandas, sea cows, sh=now leopards, butterflies and bees, but I reckon you’ve all had it,” it’s hard to know whether he’s being deliberately facetious or whether he’s plugging for a leading role in the new Lars Von Trier movie.

“We’ll miss you, though,” O’Grady admits, “if only for all the nice footage.”

Alrighty, then! Why not give up altogether — just stand idly by while pangolins and everything else marches off planet Earth into oblivion, shortly to be followed by the 91-year-old Attenborough and all hopes of a future, greener, better world.

Despite the crabby review in the UK Independent, The World’s Most Wanted Animal struck a chord with viewers across Britain. As the reaction to Planet Earth II and Blue Planet II showed, natural, history programs do better with a UK TV audience than they do in the US and Canada, but that’s not to say they don’t have an effect.

Anyone who reads this space already knows about Maria Diekmann’s Rare and Endangered Species Trust (REST, website www.restnamibia.org) and the crisis facing pangolins, scaly anteaters, the world’s only scaly mammal, who are now being trafficked at a faster rate than elephants, rhinos and tigers combined, for quasi-medicinal use in China, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand, and because their scales

Pangolins are often labelled, “the most endangered animal you’ve never heard of,” but — crabby reviews in The Independent aside — that’s exactly why programs like The World’s Most Wanted Animal serve a purpose, quite apart from filling empty hours on BBC Two and PBS’s prime-time schedules.

Years ago, while at a Television Critics Association get-together in Pasadena, Calif., I asked long-time Nature executive-producer Fred Kaufman what he looks for in a Nature documentary, considering his program has been a staple for public broadcasting in the US for nearly four decades now.

Kaufman replied that he’s always looking for new stories, stories that haven’t been told before — or, if they have been told, told in a new way. The World’s Most Wanted Animal fills the bill in both respects.

The crisis facing the world’s endangered animals — climate scientists and wildlife biologists are now talking about our present time as being the latest and potentially most serious in a series of mass extinctions — is an old, all-too-familiar story, but Most Wanted throws a new spin on it, despite The Independent’s gripe about it following a time-tested template of endearing, critically endangered animals and plucky humans, voiced-over by the sonorous tones of the great Sir David Attenborough.

A quick look at REST’s Facebook page, in the hours and days after The World’s Most Wanted Animal aired in the UK,

shows that, in actual fact, many people don’t know what a pangolin is — or at least they didn’t, until they watched the program.

Now you know.

Pangolins: The World's Most Wanted Animal premieres in the the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday, May 23, on PBS Nature at 8E/7C.

Losing it on ‘The River of Doubt:’ Teddy Roosevelt’s not-so-excellent adventure.

January 08, 2018

In 1914, just five years after serving his second term as the 26th President of the United States, avid outdoorsman and lifelong adventurer Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and the legendary Brazilian explorer Candido Rondon undertook an epic expedition into the heart of the Amazon jungle, ostensibly to chart an unknown river and, one supposes, find El Dorado, the mythical Lost City of Gold.

It ended badly. Three expeditioneers died in the jungle and the president himself was lucky to escape with his life.

Tuesday this week, as part of PBS’s ‘American Experience’ showcase, filmmaker John Maggio’s absorbing, often eye-opening documentary Into the Amazon follows Roosevelt’s great-nephew, Tweed Roosevelt, and ex-New York Times Rio de Janeiro bureau-chief Larry Rohter as they retrace the elder Roosevelt’s muddy bootprints into one of the darkest, most impenetrable jungles remaining on the planet.

It’s 2017 — or at least it was, when Into the Amazon was filmed — so how hard could it be? We’re living in the age of GPS, Lady Gaga and cellphone service, after all. Venturing into the Amazon, as fearsome as it sounds, should be no more difficult than a walk in the park, right? As long as the battery on your iPhone lasts, how hard can it be?

Pretty damn hard, as it turns out, filmmaker Maggio told a room full of reporters at this past summer’s semi-annual gathering of the Television Critics Association in Beverly Hills, Calif. — a somewhat more sedate and civilized venue than the headwaters of the Mantaro and Apumirac Rivers. There are rainforests, and then there are jungles, and then there is the Amazon. It’s a place where it’s easy enough to lose faith in one’s leader, Maggio said, sitting alongside Rohter and 21st-century jungle survivor Tweed Roosevelt.

“To your earlier question about losing faith in your leader,” Maggio said, “we had one of the locals, his name was Abhijius. He spoke an Indian dialect that I, that nobody understood. But he had previously taken — or tried to take — David Beckham on a motorcycle tour all the way across the Amazon. Beckham was on a bit of a vision quest. In the end, Beckham — ‘I would go anywhere in the world with Abhijius,’ Beckham is said to have said — that he gave him these designer boots that he'd worn the whole time.

“So the only thing that Abhijius could say to me in English was ‘Beckham boots.’ And that's all I needed to know.”

The younger Roosevelt is wise enough to know that he never was cut out for jungle travel, but the idea of following in the footsteps of his great uncle intrigued him. After all, how hard could it be?

“To begin with, when somebody called me up and said, ‘Do you want to go on this expedition?’, I listened. I always kind of thought about it in an abstract way, something I might want to do, but I'd never done anything about it and I'm not the explorer type. It's not the sort of thing I do normally.

“When I was on the phone, I thought, ‘Gee, this sounds neat.’ But it also sounded like it wasn’t actually going to happen. So I could get credit for saying I was going to go do this, and then not actually have to do it.

“And then, unfortunately, one day there I was, on the river.”

Hel-lo!

“There were several things,” Roosevelt said. “First of all, how much the same it was. And second, how much my impression of how hard it was hard for us, but how much harder it must have been for them. Much, much harder. And my respect for their abilities and what they achieved on this, just to survive, went way up. It was still gruelling, but it was much easier for us.

“We had, for example, freeze-dried food. They had real food. It weighed a lot. And what they call canoes were these dugouts that were 2,500 pounds. You had to use block-and-tackle to drag them around the rapids.

“And where there were rapids, the jungle wasn't easy. I mean, that's why there are rapids! Hel-lo! So the jungle was very difficult.”

But wait, there’s more.

“I've sort of retraced, if you will, a lot of (Theodore Roosevelt)’s trips. Because it was so difficult for him, because it was so unpleasant, because he almost died, I could feel, for whatever reason, the dark, negative side of this, going into this jungle, as opposed to the Bighorn Mountains or some of the other places I had been.”

All in all, he suggested, it’s more relaxing to read Joseph Conrad than to actually live the experience.

At least, in the 21st century, one can count on cell service, though. Rohter, as a career foreign correspondent, is used to being uncomfortable conditions in far-flung, tropical locations. He’s learned how to get out of a jam.

“I first went into the Amazon in 1978, as a Newsweek correspondent,” Rohter said. “I told them, ‘I’m going to be gone three weeks. I’ll call you when I get back.’ There was no way then to communicate with the outside world. The last time I made a journalistic trip, in 2007, I was on a canoe in the middle of the Rio Negro, and my cellphone kept ringing. I was a hundred miles north of Manaus.”

A hundred miles, in the Amazon, is nothing, though.

“There are vast areas of the Amazon where you can’t get a signal,” Roosevelt said. “That hundred miles is nothing. I mean, you’re right, I’m not arguing with you. But there are places on Martha’s Vineyard, where I live, where I can’t get a signal.

“You have to remember the Amazon is huge. To give you an idea, the Amazon River itself is, I think 13 or 15 times larger than the Mississippi. There are a thousand major rivers flowing into it. We’re talking real rivers here, rivers approaching the size of the Hudson. There’s so much there, and so little of it has been looked at, even minimally. Each river has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tributaries. Yes, you can have a GPS. You can know where you are. But there’s still a lot of adventure to be had.”

Size isn’t all that matters, either.

“Trying to navigate a flooded forest at night, when you have to go two hours to just get back to your camp, you rely on the indigenous people so much. They can tell you a caiman has red eyes, the anaconda's got blue eyes. You're watching this entire cycle of life go on in front of you. Then you get back to camp, and you're watching moths the size of bats, and the bats are eating them. And then the owls show up, and the owls start eating the bats. And all of this is happening in front of you, while you're trying to keep your wits about you.”

Does El Dorado actually exist?

“Cities, no,” Rohter said. “Tribes, yes. We know from helicopters, flying over the Basin, and from FUNAI, the Brazilian government’s National Indian Foundation, that there are still uncontacted tribes in the western Amazon.

“But when you talk about lost cities, you're probably thinking about the Fawcett book, The Lost City of Z, and the movie that just came out. That's just kind of lunacy, all that stuff. If there were cities, they would have been discovered by now. But tribes are an entirely different story.”

One thing soon came clear to everyone involved in the expedition, though, and everyone associated with making Into the Amazon: Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was a mensch. A man’s man.

Admirers of the present occupant of the White House often draw comparisons to the older Roosevelt, who was also a Republican.

“I’m afraid that I can’t tell you what I actually think about that,” the younger Roosevelt said. “It’s absurd. One thing I do say, when people make that comparison, is, ‘Yes, there are characteristics similar to both (Teddy Roosevelt) and our president, one being they both spoke a lot and said what they thought, And both are from New York. But the difference is that TR thought about it before he said it.”

Teddy Roosevelt survived his Amazon adventure — barely — but he didn’t live happily ever after. Within five years, he died in his sleep, on Jan. 6, 1919, from a blood clot that lodged in his lungs. He was just 60, a whippersnapper by modern-day terms. But he had done something few outsiders had accomplished: He had made it to the heart of the Amazon, and came back alive to tell about it.

He got a book out of it, too: Through the Brazilian Wilderness. According to one jacket blurb, ‘This astonishing tale of adventure and survival Roosevelt details his participation in the 1913-1914 Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition, undertaken a year after his failed bid for reelection. The team set out to find the headwaters of the River of Doubt then paddle the river to the Amazon. What was originally intended to be “zoogeographic reconnaissance” soon turned into a tale of survival, with turbulent whitewater and peril around every bend of the river, so much so that it nearly took the life of the “Bull Moose” himself.’

The Amazon Basin may still be raw in places, but that doesn’t mean the ecosystem isn’t endangered.

“It is as raw as you can imagine,” filmmaker Maggio affirmed. “I don't want to toot my own horn, but it was an absolutely intrepid experience to try to even just navigate the rivers there. People live on the river. They live in boats. They're masters of that world. And for me at least, to try to get this 20-person crew in and out, it was an absolute adventure. It was one I'm so glad I did. And I would never do it again.

“That said, one of the great tragedies is that, as thick as the jungle is, a lot of old-growth is no longer there, at least not the part we were in. Where we were is still a tangle of webs, but when you come across the occasional old-growth tree that is 20-, 30-, 40 feet wide, you realize what it must have been like only as recently as a hundred years ago. Those trees are still there, but you have to go much deeper into the Amazon to find them.”

Into the Amazon premieres Tuesday on PBS at 9ET/8C.

Dances with cheetahs: Kim Wolhuter films cheetah family on foot for PBS Nature special.

November 07, 2017

If there’s one thing lifelong conservationist and wildlife filmmaker Kim Wolhuter hopes viewers will take away from Wednesday’s PBS Nature special The Cheetah Children, it’ll be a sense of wonder for what remains of the natural world. Viewers themselves can take solace, too, in knowing that, if only for an hour, the news events of the day will seem faraway. PBS’s Nature — 36 seasons and climbing — has always been one of the more sober, clear-headed, less sensationalist nature programs, but it’s also carved out a hard-earned reputation for family-friendly programming that’s neither maudlin nor condescending.

The Cheetah Children, in which Wolhuter tracked a mother cheetah and her five vulnerable, weeks-old cubs with his camera through the thorn scrub and miombo bush of Zimbabwe’s Malilangwe Wildlife Reserve, has some hard lessons about natural selection and survival of the fittest, but it’s also a window into a world of almost breathtaking beauty. And simplicity.

There are no contrived confrontations between man and beast, no deliberately manipulative scenes designed to play on the audience’s emotions. In the best tradition of PBS Nature documentaries, what the cheetahs see is what you get at home, warts and all. Warthogs, too.

First, some background. There’s some of this in the program, but The Cheetah Children was never intended to be an informational lecture, or a PSA for saving endangered species per se.

The cheetah is the world’s fastest land animal, capable of sprints of 70 mph over short distances. More impressively, perhaps, the loose-limbed, lightly built cat is built for acceleration — an average adult cheetah can hit 45 mph in two seconds, faster than any Ferrari built by human hands.

It is also in serious trouble, and not just for the usual reasons — habitat destruction, poaching, trophy hunting, illegal wildlife trafficking for the pet trade, and so on. A genetic bottleneck early in the cheetah’s prehistory means that their gene pool today is tenuous at best. Many cheetahs are born with genetic deficiencies — a weak jaw, a lame foot, brittle bones, etc. Any kind of leg injury to an animal built for speed is tantamount to a death sentence.

Nature has compensated, as viewers learn early on in The Cheetah Children. Cheetahs have big litters, because the infant mortality rate is so high. Whereas the stronger, more powerful — and more genetically successful — leopard has one or two cubs, a cheetah may have as many as 10 or more.

Depending on the terrain, and how many rival predators there are in a cheetah’s territory — lions, leopards and hyenas will all kill cheetahs on sight, because nature has conditioned predators to see any competition for food as a rival for their own survival — as few as two cheetah cubs may live to see adulthood, and often not even that.

Wolhuter took great pains in The Cheetah Children to show that this is a natural process, one more complication in nature’s game of survival.

Even so, knowing the species is in real danger of extinction in our lifetimes, it’s hard to watch.

Wolhuter, the grown son of one of South Africa’s original park wardens — his father, Henry Wolhuter, was at one time Head Ranger of South Africa’s world-famous Kruger National Park, southern Africa’s equivalent of Yellowstone National Park — grew up wild.

He learned from a young age how to survive on his own in the wilderness, and how to read nature’s signs, good or bad. He learned walk barefoot through thorn scrub, and in so doing learned how to blend into his surroundings and pick up on the small details that can mean the difference between survival and dying. He learned that wild animals can become more accepting of people outside vehicles, once they determine the intruder poses no threat. The result is that today, virtually alone among contemporary wildlife filmmakers, Wolhuter makes nearly all his films on foot. That affords him a rare intimacy into the lives of his live subjects, one rarely captured by other wildlife filmmakers.

At a recent meeting of the Television Critics Association in Beverly Hills, Calif. — a world apart from the mopane forests and Zambezi teak trees of Zimbabwe — Wolhuter shared some of his innermost thoughts about living wild and one of his earlier documentaries, the self-explanatory Man, Cheetah, Wild, made at the time for the Discovery Channel. Malilangwe Reserve is in Zimbabwe’s southeastern hinterland, near the Mozambique border and about as far away from Zimbabwe’s tourist-travelled Victoria Falls as it is to get and still be in Zimbabwe.

“There's no special muti, as we call it, or juju,” Wolhuter said. “It's just that I've spent so much time with them. They've got to know me, and I've got to know them. It's hard portraying myself to them, how I can present myself with complete confidence. They can read that and understand that. They feel it.

“There's never actually been a case where cheetah have killed a person. Of all the predators — lions, leopards, wild dogs, hyenas — cheetahs are the most timid. They would rather run away from something than confront it. Yes, they do bring down antelope and other game. But those animals are running away from them. I don't run away. I present myself in a respectful manner, but also in a confident manner, and they respect that. We have this incredible relationship, which for me just went beyond anything I could ever imagine.”

Being on foot makes all the difference in the world to the resulting film.

“What I'm doing takes it to a totally different level. I spend a lot of time with these animals. Their behaviour then becomes totally natural, far more natural than if I was sitting in a jeep. I think it’s just so much more intimate than you're ever going to get sitting in a vehicle. So what we're trying to do with these cheetah is try to get you into their world. I think it’s something that people are going to engage that much more with.”

Wolhuter is not crazy, though. There are certain predators he wouldn’t dare get that close to, no matter how well he knows their habits or how well he read their emotions.

“Lions. Lions are . . . well, for one, you're not just dealing with one individual. You're dealing with a whole pride. But also, they're just far too big . Lions are incredibly aggressive animals, in that they want to kill anything and everything. Any other predator that steps up, comes anywhere near them, they'll try and kill it. So, you know, they're . . .

“I'm just not going to do it with lions.”

Joel Sartore’s Photo Ark — one by one, for posterity.

August 15, 2017

It’s not easy to photograph 12,000 animals, one at a time.

Then again, when you’re a career National Geographic photographer looking to spend more time with your children — and you’re tired of flirting with malaria and being menaced in conflict zones by drug-addled 16-year-olds with AK-47s — then a life-changing passion project seems like both a decent option and a worthwhile out.

Furthermore, when you realize that many of the wild animals you grew to love as a child are in critical danger of disappearing entirely, taking the time to make a photographic studio archive of those species that remain is an easy call to make.

For some, a passion project is all about personal satisfaction.

For Joel Sartore, a 54-year-old wildlife photographer and 20-year National Geographic veteran from Ralston, Nebraska, the Photo Ark — his multi-year project to take studio portraits of every single species on the planet, or as many as he can feasibly fit into his remaining years — has become a defining moment in humankind’s cataloguing of life on earth.

Generations from now, the world may well look back on Sartore’s Photo Ark as the sole remaining evidence that these animals ever existed.

Sartore, a lifelong conservationist, hopes it never comes to that — obviously. Too many animal species have vanished in just our lifetimes for it not to be a viable reality, though.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but Sartore’s Photo Ark pictures may be worth many more than that. (An early version of the quote, by the way, was, “One picture (is) worth ten thousand words,” as stated by Fred R. Barnard in the advertising trade journal Printer’s Ink on March 10, 1927 — but you get the picture.)

Heavy lies the burden of responsibility, especially when an unofficial record of life on earth looks like it may become part of the official record.

Sartore appeared alongside PBS-WGBH Boston programming president and one-time National Geographic filmmaker John Bredar and art director, National Geographic fellow and Rare: Creatures of the Photo Ark program maker Chun-Wei Yi at this year’s winter meeting of the Television Critics Association in Pasadena, Calif.

In an hour-long press session with reporters that was by turns sad, reflective, passionate and life-affirming, Sartore touched on everything from his lifelong interest in photography and wildlife to the future of the planet and his hopes and dreams for the Photo Ark.

What he said was worth repeating verbatim, in parts anyway. The rest, his photos — a handful appear here, with many of the rest at his gallery on www.joelsartore.com — explain so much better, and in considerably less than the 2,500 words or so that appear here.

(l-r) John Bredar, Joel Sartore, Chun-Wei Yi. ©Rahoul Ghose/PBS

ON HOW SARTORE FIRST BECAME INTERESTED IN PHOTOGRAPHY

”My parents were really interested in nature. My dad took me hunting and fishing growing up. My mother loved backyard birds and flowers and wildlife. They both cared about nature. As for photography, actually I got into photography in my senior year in high school, trying to impress a cheerleader I was in love with at Ralston High School in Nebraska. I took some pictures of her, and she found it creepy. So that was that.

“The hobby stuck, though, and it turned into a profession. I went into photojournalism in college because it didn’t require math or chemistry, to be honest with you.”

THE PHOTO ARK’S ORIGINS

“I’d been a contract photographer for the Geographic for a long time. Eleven, twelve years ago, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. And I had never really been home with my three kids. I’d never changed a diaper on the youngest one, sad to say. I was always gone. My wife was a very tolerant person; she let me go out and shoot these stories. My stories were mostly conservation related, trying to make the world a better place. But now I was home for a year, and I had a lot of time to think. I thought about the work of John James Audubon, who devoted his entire life to painting and describing the behaviours of the birds and mammals of North America. I thought of Edward Curtis, who could see that European settlement was going to change the life of Native Americans. He devoted his entire adult life to documenting tribal customs and dress before that was eroded by European society.

“I was 42 at the time. And while my life and career was half over, I thought if Kathy survived and we didn’t lose our house, because I wasn’t able to go work anymore, if she made it, I thought I really should do something that sticks. I’d had a couple of stories that got some results, shooting in the field. But my early Photo Ark pictures really seemed to hit a nerve. I don’t know, they just resonated with people. So I thought, well, I’ll just do a giant catalog. The strength of it will be when you see that there are thousands of species of rodents, not just the house mouse you may see running across your garage once in a while. There are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of beetle species. here are so many different species out there that nobody knows about. So that’s how the Photo Ark was born.

“My wife’s fine now, but it was a close call. The Photo Ark was born out of wanting to do something that stuck.

“A magazine story comes and goes in a month. Hopefully this will be around for a while, maybe for future generations. Because, really, people don’t seem to care much about extinction, if at all, right now. There wasn’t a single question asked during any of the presidential debates about the environment — not even about climate change, really. So whatever it takes to get people to have a new conversation is worthwhile. I realize true change is generational, but we don’t really have many more generations to go before things start getting really uncomfortable for all of us — extreme weather events, pollution, more division in society, that kind of thing.”

Curl-crested aracari. ©2017 Joel Sartore

ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND ITS EFFECTS

“Amphibians need plenty of moisture to lay their legs, and to breed. And if the moisture quits coming at the right time of the year, you can lose an entire amphibian species virtually overnight, in a year or two, because they're not long-lived, some of them. So climate change is a really big deal. It affects the foraging plants that butterflies need, and so many other things. It can’t be overstated how complicated it is and how we don’t even know what’s going to happen with climate change fully yet. We just know it’s going to have severe impacts for all of us, not just wildlife.”

ON WHICH ANIMALS PROVED TO BE MOST CAMERA SHY

“(The big) cats don’t care for it; you're right. But cats are also predators, and they feel pretty confident. So they're not stressed by much. When we photograph big cats, we always prep a space ahead of time, an off-exhibit space. Then the zoo will shift the animal into that space. So we’re able to do our portraits that way. It goes pretty easily and well, as a general rule.

Geoffroy's stuffedear marmoset. G2017 Joel Sartore

THE SCARIEST ANIMAL TO PHOTOGRAPH

“Oh, scariest! Scariest. You know, big cats are frightening, if they’re a little irritated. They like to charge and roar.

“Maybe the most frustrating, though, are chimps, believe it or not, because I'm not really working with trained animals, like you’d think of here in the L.A. area. I’m working with animals that are quite rare, or just unusual, and they’re not handled by people that often. They’re just not worked with. I’m not working with movie chimps. The chimps I do work with, I’ll put seamless paper up. I’ll spend an hour taping it down. And they ship the chimps in, and half the time the chimp doesn’t even come in. Then he’ll take his hand and rip the entire seamless roll into the next stall, just rips it away. We see that all the time.

“But I’ve been around animals my whole life, so I don't necessarily think of them as scary, most of them. I don’t like cockroaches much, but I’ve photographed 40 different types of species of cockroaches now. Nothing is too terribly scary. I feel like I’m their voice, and I really want to tell their story. Again, I’d say for 75 percent of the animals we photograph, this is the only time anybody is ever going to pay attention to them, so it’s an honour.”

ON THE USE OF PLAIN WHITE AND BLACK BACKDROPS

“We start off with the animal on a black-and-white background, because it’s the great equalizer. A mouse is every bit as important as an elephant. They’re both the same size. You can look animals directly in the eye that way, and really get a sense that they’re intelligent and worth saving, right. Beyond that, we can get our lights closer to the animals if we have them in a confined space, and that's why these pictures look so vivid. We alwaysthe black-and-white backgrounds; we start out that way.

“There is going to be some Photoshop in some of them. Like, with that rhino, she was really an elderly female rhino; we did not want not anything underfoot to trip her up, freak her out. So we put in the floor in Photoshop. With grazing animals, many times we’ll put the floor in in Photoshop, but we start them off our usual way. They’re lit correctly, and they’re in front of backdrops. Most of them are standing actually on a backdrop. But with black, most of the time we’ll put the floor in afterwards.”

ANIMALS THAT HAVE BECOME EXTINCT SINCE THE PROJECT BEGAN

“There's an animal called a Rabbs' tree frog that was the very last one. It was at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, and it has passed away. So they're extinct now. Another one called the Columbian basin pigmy rabbit that lives in eastern Washington State; it's more-or-less gone now. And frogs, insects.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/rabbs-tree-frog-extinct/

http://www.columbiabasinherald.com/article/20170726/ARTICLE/170729933

“When I was a kid growing up, my mother bought a picture book on birds, one the Time Life series. In the back was a section on extinction. It showed the passenger pigeon, and some other birds that had gone extinct. I was always amazed by that. I didn’t think I would live long enough to see another animal go extinct. Well, in the 11 years I’ve been doing the Photo Ark project, I’ve probably seen ten go extinct. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

“If people don't stop and think about how we’re deforesting the planet and straining the oceans, it’s worrying to see what might happen. We really do need a sea change in how the public views its relationship with nature and habitats. We truly do. And that’s kind of the point of the project. At its worst, the Photo Ark is just a big archive of what we threw away. At its best, I like to think it can motivate people to care and take action, while there’s still time.

“It's really late in the game for many of those animals.”

ON WORKING WITH AND ON ZOO GROUNDS

“Most of the time, 99.9 percent of the time, I'm working at captive institutions, because as likeable as I am, it’s really hard to convince a wild tiger to come up and lie on your black backdrop in India. So we work primarily at zoos, aquariums, private breeders and wildlife rehab centres. And to be perfectly honest with you, those are the keepers of the kingdom. A lot of these animals don’t exist in the wild anymore. They’re only found in zoos or at private breeders. The wild is gone. The habitat has been cut. So they really are the ark, the true ark, a lot of these institutions.

“I do try to work at places that have abundant attention and care. The few times where I have shot the wild, it was a little tricky. There are a couple of species of lemur that aren't really found in captivity anywhere. They can’t be kept in captivity because of their diet. One is the world’s largest lemur, called an indri. (Chun-Wei) thought it would be great to go and get one in the wild, and I was, like, ‘They live up in the trees and they move like rocket ships.’ But he found one that was trained to come down for tourists and eat out of one guide’s hands. We had this black backdrop and we lit it. It’s shocking that we were able to get that, but we did. But, make no mistake, it’s difficult to do in the wild. We can do small animals in the wild, but mainly we work in captive institutions.

“And that does put a cap on the project, on what we can do. The world’s zoos, aquariums, that kind of thing, they have between 12- and 14,000 species. And in the wild, in nature, there are millions. I could probably do another 10, 15 years on this, and get to most of what the world had captive. But to do that in the wild, it’s virtually impossible.”

Brown-throated sloth. ©2017 Joel Sartore

ON SHARING IMAGES WITH OTHER INSTITUTIONS

”I did want to make one more comment about that; I want to follow up. We share the pictures with every zoo or aquarium. We share these pictures for free, and then we promote the place where they were taken on social media. Geographic’s Instagram account has more than 65 million followers now. So that is really a powerful way to get the message out about these animals. It’s a also a good deal for most of these places, and they realize that. They've seen the pictures. They know about the projects. Access is a lot easier now. When I started, the first couple of years I remember I was allowed to photograph snakes and turtles, and that was about it, because what can you do to a snake or turtle, right? So that was it.

“But now we have a lot of access, to different animals. And we make sure the world sees these animals. The shoot with a zoo or an aquarium is usually the start of our relationship, because we'll be posting these pictures for years to come and let the public know about these creatures.

“I mean, you realize it would be absolutely catastrophic if we lose biodiversity. It is catastrophic. It’s hard to picture in L.A. You’re in your car. The radio’s turned up. You go to a nice place to eat. You hang out there. You go back, file a story. But it will be absolutely catastrophic if we collapse the ecosystems on the planet. We have to have rainforests to provide us with oxygen and regulate precipitation. We have to have bees to pollinate fruits and vegetables that we eat. It's not something anybody’s talking about right now, and I’m hoping that people will wake up eventually and start to do so.”

South Georgia king penguins. ©2017 Joel Sartore

ON PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE ISSUE OF FILM v. DIGITAL

“Digital is a racehorse compared to film, a racehorse. It’s so much more flexible when it comes to press standards, reproduction standards. And it’s made the shoots go a lot quicker. We can photograph animals very, very quickly. That’s key to reducing stress. We can see what we’re getting on the back of the camera, and stop right then. With film, you were always guessing. I did not start the Photo Ark on anything but digital.”

ON 4K AND THE PRESSURE TO KEEP UP WITH ADVANCING CAMERA TECHNOLOGY

“It’s tough, it really is. I do some video in 4K, but most of what I do is stills that are 41-meg files now, with the latest Nikon gear. But still, it’s only archival for as long as you maintain the equipment that can read those files. So there is this constant dilemma going forward in time.

“We're talking about animals that won't be here in 50 years, 100 years. How will we make sure people are able to see it? We make sure that we print out the best ones to archival film or paper. We do books, exhibitions.

“It’s a big question. Nobody really knows how we're going to archive things 100 years from now that need to be archived. We really don’t know, so it’s a dilemma. Going back and looking at the first photographs, the technology has changed so much that some of them already look crude. But we do what we can. These animals are here now, gone tomorrow. We document them as best we can now and just hope. Hope for the best.”

HOW TO IMPROVE ONE’S OWN PHOTOGRAPHY, WHETHER YOU;RE A HOBBYIST OR PRO

”Use your brain. I’m not being facetious. You can shoot great pictures with a smartphone. In fact, Geographic has ’The Great Courses’ course now that has Geographic photographers teaching just that. It is not the gear. It is how you see. It is whether or not you think about how a subject would look from above, from ground level, in nice light, something interesting. Those are the keys. Nice light, something interesting, perspective — and a clean background that doesn’t fight you. You're trying to tell a story. Everybody’s trying to tell a story. It’s that simple, but it's not that easy, because life’s pretty chaotic. Great stuff doesn’t always happen in nice light. It’s certainly true when we were filming this show — if an animal is out in the brush, it’s very hard to see. That’s why the Photo Ark pictures are effective — it’s because we can actually see the animal. A lot of these animals live under the leaf litter or in muddy water. So having a clean, nice background, a great moment in time and a nice light, those are keys. But don’t worry about the gear. Do not worry about the gear.”

West Usumbara two-horned chameleon. ©2017 Joel Sartore

THE LAST WORD — AND REASON FOR HOPE

“We try to leave people with a sense of hope, because there is hope. Most of what I've photographed so far — and we're halfway done with the Photo Ark now — we're trying to get every captive species in the world. We’re at more than 6,000 now. Most of these animals can be saved, but it takes people knowing that they exist. We're not going to save anything we've never met.

“Most of them can be saved, but we've got to save big tracts of intact habitat. We cannot log every tropical rainforest and expect that things are going to be okay. It’s going to screw up global precipitation patterns like crazy, and millions of people will starve when the rains don’t come to the areas where they need rain to grow crops. It’s much bigger than just saving a rhino or a frog. It really is.

“But, sure, absolutely, there’s hope, or I wouldn't be doing it.”

National Geographic  Photo Ark covers. ©2017 Joel Sartore — National Geographic Photo Ark covers. ©2017 Joel Sartore

Extinct animals on film

October 31, 2016

One of several little-known facts revealed in PBS’s Nature’s two-part program The Story of Cats (premiered Nov. 2) is that every cat species on Earth — some 37 in all — can trace its genetic origin at least in part to the Southeast Asian clouded leopard.

That’s worth noting, because as a recent compilation video distributed by the Asian conservation group COPAL points out, the Formosan clouded leopard was just one of several species to become extinct in the 21st century.

Climate change, as forewarned in Leo DiCaprio’s National Geographic film Before the Flood, is just one factor. Connections are often drawn between climate change and habitat loss, which is the real cause driving most extinctions today.

Habitat loss is a critical problem, especially as the world's population continues to expand and grow. Other animals to have vanished since the year 2000 include the Japanese river otter, the Baiji dolphin, the Pyrenean ibex, the Pinta Island tortoise and the Bermuda saw-whet owl, and that's just in the past two decades.

Dodo, Julian Pender/NHM. — Dodo, Julian Pender/NHM.

What's done is done, of course. The dodo famously died out some 300 years ago, in one of the first known man-made extinctions, and has never been since, except in artists' renderings.

Avian paleontologist and artist Julian Pender, an expert on the dodo with the Natural HIstory Museum in London, explains his process behind painting a portrait of the dodo in this video:

The dodo reminds us that what we take for granted today can be so easily forgotten tomorrow.

Food for thought — and posterity.

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