But he also serves as media director for Panthera, a nonprofit group that works on behalf of big cats in the wild. In a matter of weeks he has a dinner date with the Honduran president and some of the group’s scientists to discuss creating a wildlife corridor for jaguars between the United States and Central America.
Wildlife photographers turn their cameras toward conservation
By
Juliet Eilperin
The Washington Post
February 20, 2012
Winter belongs to a new breed of environmental photographers who not only record wildlife and the stunning worlds they inhabit, but also push to preserve them.
Steve Winter has followed snow leopards through the Himalayas, been trapped in quicksand in the world’s largest tiger reserve in Burma and been stalked by jaguars in Brazil. As a National Geographic photographer, that’s all just part of his job.
“The world needs no more pictures of pretty animals,” said Winter. “What the world needs is the story behind these animals, and their struggle of being around humans.” Winter belongs to a new breed of environmental photographers who not only record wildlife and the stunning worlds they inhabit, but also push to preserve them. Of course prominent wildlife photographers, including Ansel Adams, have spoken out for conservation in the past. But today’s photographers have taken it to new heights, by changing how they craft their images and directly lobbying policymakers in Washington and abroad. Winter, who speaks about the threats to big cats’ survival in National Geographic lectures, has met with government officials in India, Burma, Cuba and Costa Rica to discuss species he’s photographed. Brian Skerry, an underwater National Geographic photographer, sent his new book “Ocean Soul” to every member of the Senate Ocean Caucus along with a personal note thanking them for their conservation efforts. Nature photographer Amy Gulick published a book, “Salmon in the Trees,” that documents the link between wild salmon, grizzly bears and old-growth trees in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest; there’s a copy on the desk of the Agriculture Department’s under secretary for natural resources and environment, Harris Sherman. Sherman says it “connects the critical dots between healthy forests and rivers with sustainable salmon fisheries,” and describes it as “a must-read” for understanding ecosystems like the Tongass. Once they’ve captured the photos, many of these photographers hit the lecture circuit to advocate for conservation. Two scientists who are spearheading the effort to create a wildlife corridor for jaguars, Alan Rabinowitz and Howard Quigley, invited Winter to dine with Honduran President Porfirio Lobo so he can show him some of the images of jaguars he’s taken in the field. A group from the International League of Conservation Photographers joined with the Sierra Club in 2009 to campaign successfully against mountaintop mining removal in British Columbia’s Flathead River Valley. “Politicians are afraid of these images,” said marine biologist and photographer Cristina Mittermeier. Documenting peril In 2005 Mittermeier published an article in the International Journal of Wilderness arguing for the development of “conservation photography” — as opposed to wildlife photography — on the grounds it would encourage changes in government policy. She recruited photographers to attend the World Wilderness Congress in Anchorage, where she helped launch the International League of Conservation Photographers, a group that now boasts 104 fellows in 25 countries. Their goal: to document ecoystems in peril. Technology has allowed these photographers to get closer to their subjects than ever before. They use devices such as infrared sensors and submersibles that can plunge to the ocean’s depths. And they take risks, flying on helicopters without doors, camping on freezing mountaintops, chatting up poachers and exposing themselves to an array of diseases. “You do have to put yourself in harm’s way,” explained Skerry, who has launched a five-year project to chronicle New England’s ocean in order to press for more protective measures. “Many of us are invested in telling stories about the environment. But at the end of the day we love the rush and love getting the pictures.” Over the course of his 35-year career, Skerry has experienced plenty of close calls. He has gotten momentarily lost under Arctic pack ice in water that was 28.5 degrees Fahrenheit. He has been grabbed by a Humboldt squid, an animal with 24,000 teeth on its arms, and chased by a sperm whale. His scariest moment came when a nine-foot-long saltwater crocodile came within three feet of him at the edge of a mangrove forest in Mexico, even as his assistant tried to fend off the animal with a PVC pipe. “I knew I was being stalked and hunted,” Skerry says. “If he attacked, there wouldn’t be a way to get out quickly.” He extricated himself by backing up carefully so as not to disturb the silt in the water. But Skerry, whose new book features a close-up of a tiger shark’s toothy jaws, said his photos underscore the fact that these animals “let us into their world. The message of that picture is he could have eaten me, but he didn’t.” Skerry speaks publicly on the need to protect dwindling shark populations; he just won the Peter Benchley Ocean Award for Excellence in Media for his outreach efforts. His TED talk on “The Glory and Horror in the Sea” has attracted close to half a million views. Watching ice melt Shrinking habitat, Mittermeier said, has forced photographers “to go to the furthermost reaches” of the planet to capture wilderness on film. In 2006, James Balog, a scientist and nature photographer, came up with the idea of launching an “Extreme Ice Survey” that would capture the melting of glaciers across the Earth with time-lapse photography. He borrowed a neighbor’s eight-foot folding table to start building cameras that could function in sub-zero temperatures and withstand 150 mph winds for a year. He promised to return the table in two weeks; months later he still had it: “It turned out to be immensely more difficult than I had thought.” Balog consulted with scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab as well as the Universities of Colorado and Wyoming. But all this research didn’t ensure the cameras’ timers would work reliably, and Balog discovered what was wrong while standing with a NASA electronic engineer atop a 2,000-foot-tall cliff in Greenland. It turned out the circuit boards he had ordered used scotch tape to hold together a central component for the timers, so the men had to work furiously to fix them. “I was terribly conscious of the specter of defeat hanging over it,” he said. It came together in the end. Balog’s survey, which was featured in National Geographic and is now the basis for the new documentary, “Chasing Ice,” continues to capture photos on 26 solar-powered cameras even as he has embarked on a new project showing how climate change is transforming forests in the American West. Balog has given three presentations on his work to members of Congress and one to the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, and has represented NASA at the U.S. Pavilion during the 2009 U.N. climate negotiations in Copenhagen. “By 2009 I thought, ‘I guess this is going on indefinitely, because this is a major part of history,” he said. “The longer it can be recorded, the more visually and emotionally powerful it is.” Spying on lions Michael “Nick” Nichols, a National Geographic editor-at-large who has trekked across parts of the Congo Basin and climbed massive redwoods, has been worrying about the decline of the world’s lion population for more than a decade. So he has spent years devising and obtaining the equipment he needs to chronicle them on the Serengeti. Because they’re active at night, Nichols is using infrared lights and sensors. He’s employing a miniature German-built helicopter to capture how lions live and bear witness to their vulnerability. “The technology is in place to look at lions in a new way,” he said. Gulick, who lobbied on Capitol Hill to protect the the Tongass and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, said digital photography provides an “immediacy in which we can share those images and get them out to other media.” Still, she added, the power still lies in the picture regardless of how it’s now shot or transmitted. “Those terms of storytelling haven’t changed, regardless of what technology is available to us.” As Balog observed, photographers are still motivated by aesthetics. “It’s the beauty, the art and the architecture of these landscapes,” he said. “This isn’t all pounding the table and making polemic statements.”
