TCA

Netflix’s ‘Our Planet’: ‘Planet Earth’ revisited, but with a stronger, clearer eco-voice.

April 04, 2019

Politics is inescapable these days, it seems. Take something as seemingly benevolent and benign — and beautiful to behold — as Our Planet, the new, eye-filling nature series from Netflix, narrated by the ubiquitous Sir David Attenborough.

At the time of Netflix’s original announcement, Our Planet was to be similar and yet different to such distinctive, ground-breaking natural history programs as Planet Earth and Blue Planet. And, as the great unwashed are about to learn Friday, it has largely succeeded. There are moments of real, eye-filling majesty and genuine grandeur, backed by the swelling symphonic score of film composer Steven Price. Overbearing, yes, but it fits this kind of program. It’s easy to forget now but when the original Planet Earth came out, the loud, overblown music was by George Fenton, fresh off an Academy Award for Gandhi and its follow-up Cry Freedom, both films directed by Attenborough’s brother, the late Sir Richard “Dickie” Attenborough.

The familiar visual paean to nature and the natural world that made Planet Earth and Blue Planet must-see viewing in countless households around the world is there for all to see in Our Planet, and on a Netflix budget to boot.

This time, though, there’s a noticeable difference, and not just the subtle shift in tone. Our Planet, eight episodes in all, is more eco-aware and socially conscious. It strikes a cautionary tone — a warning. Not alarm, exactly, but still. Our Planet is no longer nature programming that focuses on nature-for-nature’s-sake, to the exclusion of any environmental message beyond a polite, almost apologetic request that we be more careful with the Earth’s dwindling natural resources. Please remember to turn off the lights on your way out, and try not to wreck the climate during your drive home.
There’s a sadness, a feeling of regret tinged with genuine fear of an uncertain future as we’re reminded, time and time again, that polar bears and elephants might not be with us much longer.

And not just polar bears and elephants, either, but bees, hummingbirds, ocean-going reef sharks and everything in-between.

Our Planet opens with a close-up view from space — reminders of 2001: A Space Odyssey — of the moon, with the Earth rising gradually behind it. Since Neil Armstrong made his first step for man and giant leap for mankind, on July 20, 1969, Attenborough tells us, the human population has doubled, while wildlife numbers have dwindled some 60 percent during the same time.

Our Planet isn’t strident. It doesn’t harangue us with a lecture from the bully pulpit, though there are certainly those eco-crusaders out there who would prefer to shake every last one of us — not without reason — into waking up.

Attenborough has not left BBC for Netflix, as some in the media suggested at the time. (Looking at it from both sides of the media divide, these things are easy to misreport, especially given today’s frantic get-it-first-before-you-get-it-right climate of competition in information.)

Attenborough may be 92 (he turns 93 next month) but he’s committed to several more big projects for BBC, including Frozen Planet II, Blue Planet III and Planet Earth III.

Similarly, he has left the door open at Netflix. He was signed after-the-fact to narrate Our Planet as a one-off, to give the expensive — even by Netflix standards — program instant gravitas and global credibility. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the current TV landscape is such that Netflix can reach more viewers in a single week than BBC can over the course of an entire year.

That instant access to the global village is one reason Attenborough needed no convincing to exchange Broadcasting House in London for Netflix in Los Gatos, Calif.

In his later years, he has readily admitted to anyone who’ll listen that his raison d’être in later life is to convince anyone and everyone he can that our home world is in trouble and needs our help.

Netflix’s reach doesn’t exactly exceed its grasp, either: Our Planet could conceivably reach one billion people, something not even BBC can do.

Attenborough is the face and voice behind Our Planet, but not its primary inspiration and directing force. That would be veteran British producer Alastair Fothergill, who made Blue Planet and Planet Earth for BBC and has recently divided his time between BBC, Disney’s Disneynature film division (African Cats, Chimpanzee and the soon-to-be released Penguins, in theatres April 17) and now Netflix.

Fothergill, a Fellow of the British Royal Television Society and recipient of the Royal Geographical Society’s Cherry Keaton Medal, has been at the vanguard of socially conscious, environmentally aware nature filmmaking that seeks to be both entertaining and informative. Unlike Blue Planet, which touched only briefly on plastic’s effect on the world’s oceans, Our Planet’s entire focus is on the man-made threat to the natural world.

Early reviews in the UK — in the Daily Telegraph and Independent, for example — have grumbled that, beautiful as Our Planet is to watch, the overall effect is scattered and unfocused as a result. Fothergill would argue that, unlike Dynasties with its Shakespearean tales of kings and matriarchs facing rebellion and revenge from within, Our Planet is unified by a single, overpowering message: that everything is connected, that what affects the ice fields in Canada’s frozen north also affects the semi-arid deserts in Africa’s sun-parched south, not just Arctic bears and savannah elephants myriad microorganisms, smaller animals and pollinating insects that lie between.

“From every region of the world there are stories that reveal nature’s resilience and show how restoration is possible,” Attenborough says in his voice-over — a reminder once again how, over time, his soothing, reverential tones have a calming effect on this crazy world we live in.

There’s something joyful — and joyous — in the way Attenborough reads out loud. It’s one of the reasons, I suspect, why Blue Planet and Planet Earth have reached such a wide audience. He’s a born storyteller. It’s not hard to imagine that programs like Blue Planet and now Our Planet wouldn’t reach nearly as many people without Attenborough as their verbal guide and shepherd.

Our Planet is important because, while it doesn’t harangue and harass us at home the way a TED Talk might, it focuses on the most important threat to humanity — arguably the most important threat of our generation — in ways that both move and inspire.

Attenborough is the star but the last word, by rights, belongs to Fothergill.

“When Huw (Cordrey) and I both made Planet Earth, that series was about amazing scenery,” Fothergill recalled a number of years back at a Television Critics Association press session in Pasadena, Calif. for the then new BBC nature program The Hunt. “It was about taking the audience on a journey around the planet that they could never do in their lifetime.”

What he’s tried to do with Our Planet is combine that epic cinematic poetry with a potent, topical message about climate change, species diversity and the perilous balance of nature, and why all those things matter to our collective future on planet Earth, and to the planet itself.

Only time will tell if Our Planet — and we ourselves — succeed.

‘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.

Big Cats Initiative + World Wildlife Day = Causing an uproar.

February 28, 2018

Think about this: We have lost 95% of the world’s wild tigers in the past century. During that time, lion populations have crashed 40% — in just three generations. That’s just one reason why, this year, World Wildlife Day (Saturday) is focusing on the plight facing the world’s #BigCats.

It’s the reason South Africa-born husband-and-wife naturalist team Beverly Joubert and Dereck Joubert have made big-cat conservation their life’s calling, and why they were instrumental in founding National Geographic’s Big Cat Initiative in 2009. (https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/big-cats-initiative/about/)

This may sound obvious to anyone who’s thought about the implications — long-term and short-term — of overpopulation, climate change and rampant consumption, but to hear Dereck and Beverly Joubert tell it, it’s not obvious at all to ordinary, everyday people who are too busy feeding their families and keeping a roof over their heads to worry about whether lions will go the way of the Tasmanian tiger and sabre-toothed cat. Historically, the Tasmanian tiger — once found throughout the continent of Australia — became extinct on the mainland some 3,000 years ago. The last known Tasmanian tiger died at Australia’s Hobart Zoo in 1936; the species was declared extinct in 1982.

©University of Melbourne - Museums Victoria

Unless something is done, and done quickly, the Jouberts told a rapt audience several years ago at a meeting of the Television Critics Association in Beverly Hills, Calif., iconic apex predators like the lion, tiger, jaguar, puma, cheetah and leopard could vanish by mid-century.

“We’ve been studying and looking at big cats now for about 30 years,” Dereck Joubert told reporters at a meeting sponsored by National Geographic’s NatGeoWild digital channel, “and one of the alarming things for us, which was the genesis of (this project) actually, was the realization that, in our lifetimes, lions have dropped from 450,000 down to 20,000, and leopard numbers are from 700,000 down to about 50,000. If you take an extension of that curve, you will imagine these big cats to be extinct within the next 10 or 15 years.

“We’ve been working on this for a long time. But now is the time to bring it to wider attention.”

As World Wildlife Day dawns, CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) is anxious to put a familiar face on wildlife conservation efforts around the world. It isn’t just to do with lions, of course, but lions are an emblematic symbol that almost anyone can recognize, from the youngest child to the most jaded, cynical adult.

“What’s important ultimately, and what's going to help us with the Big Cats Initiative, is getting the message out,” Beverly Joubert said. “A lot of people don't believe there is even a problem, so they say, ‘Why should we worry?’ Through the Big Cats Initiative, we've managed to raise money for cheetahs, for example, so we will have a lot of cheetah programs out there. We're not only looking at lions and leopards.

“Big cats are the iconic species. They’re the apex predator. If the apex predator is taken out of the system, the whole system collapses. We need the apex predators we can maintain corridors for elephants, for antelope, for the tiny little dung beetles. Everything is connected. It’s vitally important.”

Apologists for the hunting industry often argue that hunting is vital economically for species survival.

Balderdash, Dereck Joubert scoffs — though he’s inclined to use a stronger modifier.

“We are very, very adamant about hunting. This is all about ego. They call it recreational hunting, as if we could also be talking about playing tennis. Some people go out and take some great delight in the killing of these animals. Five hundred lion skins — lions in dead form — come into the United States every year as hunting trophies and safari trophies. With 20,000 lions left, you know that's not sustainable.”

Learning endangered species’ day-to-day life habits is key to ensuring its long-term survival, Beverly Joubert added. That’s part of what the Big Cats Initiative is all about and, in the bigger picture, World Wildlife Day itself.

“We want to be able to look at that unique behaviour right now and see how we can utilize what has happened in the past and where we are in the present and use that to give us a better idea of what’s going to happen in the future,” she said. “It’s looking at the plight of these cats, learning from it and applying those lessons to the future, whether it’s to do with hunting and poaching or just protecting these wildlife corridors.”

World Wildlife Day could just as easily be about the dung beetle or leopard tortoise, Dereck Joubert believes.

But.

“There are a number of great iconic species, and I think it’s our job to pick them and highlight them. The conservation that goes on around these other species is just as valid, but you gotta pick the cheerleaders.

“Also, we have a lot more fun filming lions that dung beetles,” he said.

“But we still film those dung beetles,” Beverly Joubert chimed in.

They’re all connected.

Except where noted otherwise, the images in this post were taken by Beverly Joubert in association with National Geographic/Big Cats Initiative. World Wildlife Day is Sat., March 3. #PredatorsUnderThreat #WWD2018 #BigCats

A lion’s tale: Reporting from the front lines of lion conservation.

February 09, 2018

Here’s something you probably didn’t know.

There are fewer wild lions remaining in the world than rhinos.

Yes, it’s true. For all the recent campaigns highlighting the plight of the rhino — and rightly so — one of the most iconic species known to humankind is on the brink.

That seems hard to believe, as the lion is the one animal somebody thinks of — and expects to see — when going to the zoo.

Numbers don’t lie however. Hardly anyone familiar with the impact of overpopulation and stresses on the environment in the post-industrial age will be surprised to learn that Africa’s lion population has crashed 90% in just the past 75 years.

It’s hard to quantify that figure in real terms, though.

A more telling number is that there are roughly 30,000 rhinos left in the wild, according to recent surveys. (These numbers are especially reliable today because recent media attention over the illegal killing of rhinos for their horns has prompted a wide range of population surveys. Rhinos are relatively easy to count, too, as they can be spotted from the air, are diurnal and favour open spaces over dense bush.)

Lions, on the other hand, number some 20,000. Little more than a century ago, there were more than 200,000. Lions are extinct today in 26 African countries.

©National Geographic/Natural History Film Unit

These figures come from wildlife biologist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer Thandiwe (Thandi) Mweetwa, but have been confirmed by any number of peer-reviewed scientific surveys. We tend to think there are more lions than there really are because they’re social animals. They live in large family groups, so when you see one lion in the wild, chances are you will see several of them together, whether it’s a male coalition, a lone lioness with newborn cubs, or a full-on pride. That gives the illusion that they’re plentiful, when in fact the evidence shows they’re anything but.

Mweetwa, Zambian-born and educated at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (veterinary medicine) and University of Arizona in Tucson (resources conservation), is a senior wildlife biologist with the Zambian Carnivore Project.

When one thinks of African game parks, one naturally thinks of the Serengeti and Maasai Mara in East Africa, Kruger National Park in South Africa or even Etosha in Namibia, but Zambia is home to several of the less trammelled and most pristine wilderness areas on the entire continent.

Mweetwa is based in the Luangwa River Valley — South Luangwa National Park rests on one of the main tributaries to the Zambezi River, which feeds into Victoria Falls. Luangwa’s ecosystem is every bit as detailed and complex as anything in Serengeti, but the fact that there so few tourist visitors, relative to its more famous cousins in Kenya and Tanzania, makes Luangwa an ideal test lab for biological field studies.

Mweetwa was one of a handful of scientists, nature photographers and program producers who appeared at the semi-annual gathering of the TV Critics Association in Beverly Hills, Calif.this past summer — I’m an active member, owing to my regular columns for the New Jersey-based site TVWorthWatching.com — to promote NatGeo Wild’s eighth annual Big Cat Week, designed to raise awareness of, and promote interest in, National Geographic’s self-explanatory Big Cat Initiative. Among its other programs, the Big Cat Initiative helps raise funds for big cat conservation; Mweetwa’s work is supported in part by a grant from National Geographic.

Mweetwa was just 12 when she moved from a small town in southern Zambia to the rural north. Her parents had died within two years of each other; her uncle agreed to take her in, in her mother’s home village of Mfuwe in Zambia’s far north. She had seen wildlife documentaries on the tiny, 12-inch family TV set as a young child growing up in the south, but now she found herself living in a modest red-brick house with no running water or electricity, let alone a TV. She was exposed on a daily basis to the wildlife she had only seen in pictures, though, and it wasn’t long before she developed an interest in the ubiqitous baboons, vervet monkeys, bushbuck, buffalo and puku antelope that frequented the mango groves surrounding the village. That led to a growing curiosity about the shadowy predators one often hears about but rarely sees — the leopard, a creature of the night; African wild dogs, tireless hunters during the day; and, at the top of the food chain, the lion.

“It was the documentaries,” Mweetwa explained, when asked what first piqued her interest in lions. The irony that her field work is now supported by National Geographic’s network of international TV channels is not lost on her.

“We had a black-and-white TV set, and even then there was no colour,” she said. “But these animals just spoke to me at a certain level that I felt, okay, maybe I should do something to protexct them in the wild. With big cats in partitcular, I was completely sold well I saw my very first lion at the age of, possibly, 21 or 22, when I heard them roar, like, in broad daylight. It was nothing I had ever experienced before, and it completely sold me.”

Today, Mweetwa is a senior ecologist and community educator with the Zambian Carnivore Programme. Her work revolves around poplation dynamics and threwats to the survival of lions and other carnivores in eastern Zambia. She believes the key to any species’ survival is getting local communities involved and convincing area residents to support wildlife conservation and environmental awareness programs.

Mweetwa’s work gained new attention this past week, thanks to her National Geographic video in which she shows that female lions in a pride often have cubs at the same time, to facilitate group parenting, in which a group of new mothers raise each other’s offspring alongisde their own cubs.

The situation facing lions is serious, Mweetwa says.

(L-R) Steve Winter, Bob Poole, Thandiwe Mweetwa, Brad Bestelink and Andy Crawford. ©NatGeo Wild

Climate change is, marked by longer and more frequent dorughts, has led to significant human-wildlife conflict in Kenya and Tanzania especially, as livestock herders push their goats and cattle inside park boundaries, in an effort to find water and food, while hungry lions leave park boundaries and cause mayhem. In Zambia, where Mweetwa works, and throughout southern Africa, lions are being hunted for the bushmeat trade, and for ritual charms and would-be cures used in traditional medicine.

Mweetwa is mindful that relatively few travellers from the West will ever visit Africa’s wilderness areas, let alone see a lion in the wild.

That’s where National Geographic’s films and magazine come in. Fantastic beasts and where to find them, and all that.

“It’s important to show people really nice footage of these animals that will make them go, ‘Ohhh, this is really cool,’” Mweetwa explained. “A lot of times people have this perception that these animals cause more problems than they actually do. It’s difficult living with lions, as you can imagine. But (where I live), there’s too much negative perception, lions being blamed for things they maybe didn’t do. So programming like Savage Kingdom, for instance, is very important in getting people to realize that these are magnificent beasts, and they’re worth keeping in the landscape.”

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/big-cats-initiative/updates/

Not yeti — at least, not yet.

January 31, 2018

I shared an elevator not so long ago with Matt Moneymaker. In a Beverly Hills hotel. He saw my TV Critics Association name badge, looked at me quizzically and said, “Didn’t you write about me?”

Moneymaker, the Finding Bigfoot guy, had seen something I had written at the time for the local paper in Vancouver — the wilderness surrounding Vancouver in southwestern BC is Bigfoot country, or said to be, at any rate — and this was his way of saying he hadn’t appreciated my tone in the article. That tone was not so much skeptical as, well . . . satirical. I saw his lifelong ambition — well, nine seasons and counting of Finding Bigfoot — as parody, and had decided that while Finding Bigfoot was rousingly good TV, it was not exactly good science.

I thought about Moneymaker when I came across a recent heading in The Guardian: “DNA sampling exposes nine ‘yeti specimens’ as eight bears and a dog.”

“Huge, ape-like and hairy,” the Guardian science correspondent Nicola Davis wrote, “the yeti has roamed its way into legend, tantalizing explorers, mountaineers and locals with curious footprints and fleeting appearances. Now researches say the elusive inhabitant of the Himalayas and Tibetan plateau has been unmasked.”

It turned out that scientists studying nine DNA samples of hair and teeth, ostensibly from yetis, found the samples belonged to bears. One sample, though, proved to be different — the exception that proves the rule? — and not just because it had been taken from a stuffed yeti, as opposed to a yeti that had been hit by a car on the Alaska Highway or shot by a fat dentist from Minnesota.

The sample in question turned out to be a genetic mélange consisting of the hair of a bear and the teeth of a dog. Bear bites dog, or dog bites bear: take your pick.

Either way, the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the yeti was decidedly a ‘no.’

Darn scientists. Ruining everything with their, ahem, facts.

“It demonstrates that modern science can . . . try and tackle some of these mysteries and unsolved questions we have,” spoilsport-in-chief Dr. Charlotte Lindqvist told The Guardian, Lindqvist, a trained biologist, specializes in bear genomics and was co-author of the study at State University of New York at Buffalo, a public research university formerly known as the University of Buffalo. SUNY Buffalo counts NASA astronauts Ellen Baker and Gregory Jarvis and CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer among its alumni, and is the largest public university in the state of New York. The school’s motto is Mens sana in corpore sano — “Sound Mind in a Sound Body” — and academic standards are high. We’re not talking about Trump University here, so any research findings have to be taken seriously.

Dr. Lindqvist herself studied at the University of Denmark in Copenhagen and conducted her postdoctoral research at University of Oslo, Norway, specializing in “speciation processes, polyploidy and hybridization in animals and plants, particularly marine mammals.” Her current projects include the study of polar bear evolution — critically important now, considering the effects of climate change on Arctic polar bear populations — and microbiata in marine mammals.

It seems the yeti of myth and mountain lore owes more to the Tibetan and Himalayan brown bear, genetically speaking, than the Abominable Snowman first hinted at in mountaineer B.H. Hodgson’s account of journeying through northern Nepal in 1832, as published at the time in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.

Closer to home, there have always been suspicions that Bigfoot is a distant cousin of the yeti, in the same way the North American grizzly is a distant cousin of the Himalayan brown bear.

The skeptics may be a dime-a-dozen, but Moneymaker is having none of it. Skepticism, that is.

“Actually there’s every kind of evidence that these things exist, except bones, except a carcass,” he told TV critics in Los Angeles. “There’s sound recordings, there’s videos, there’s photographs, there’s footprint casts, there’s hairs. There’s everything except a carcass. And they’re very rare. They’re not everywhere. And animals, when they die out in the woods, usually they’re in places where people aren’t going to stumble across them.”

Moneymaker is a real name, by the way. Or so he says.

“It’s actually a translation of the last name ‘Geldmacher,’ which is very common in Germany. It was translated in 1789. It means coinmaker in the Middle Ages.”

Meanwhile, back in the world of science, Lindqvist’s findings may have temporarily dashed cold water on a tantalizing “what if” tale, but they’ve provided plenty of fodder in social media chat rooms.

Hikers in Tibet and the Himalayas need not fear the monstrous yeti, goes one salient piece of advice, but they’d l better carry bear spray if they do.

As for Finding Bigfoot — in which the lads search far and wide, but never actually catch up to one — one skeptic on YouTube asked, somewhat pointedly, “How come everybody sees a Bigfoot except them?”

“Shouldn’t they at least have found a dead one?” another doubter wanted to know.

“We asked the hosts of Finding Bigfoot why it’s taking them so damn long,” the science-technology website Gizmodo said of Moneymaker and Bigfoot “evidence analyst” Cliff Barackman, back in 2016, when Bigfoot was in its eighth season.

That answer should be self-evident, one doubter groused on the site’s message board.

How is this show still alive, another demanded to know.

Well, that part’s easy.

If Bigfoot — or the yeti for that matter — doesn’t exist in real life, surely the show can last forever.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/aug/10/travelbooks.samwollaston

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/17/yeti-dna-ancient-polar-bear-scientists

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/no-joke-b-c-minister-laughs-off-lawsuit-claiming-proof-of-bigfoot-1.3656876

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.

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

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