Boyd Norton likes to describe himself as a “recovering nuclear physicist.” As a researcher for the Atomic Energy Commission in Idaho, he once blew up a nuclear reactor as a test. While residing in Idaho, he led several successful battles to save threatened wilderness using his photography. For the past four decades, he has been a freelance photographer and writer specializing in global environmental issues. He is the photographer and author of seventeen books, ranging in topics from African elephants to mountain gorillas, and from Siberia’s Lake Baikal to the Serengeti ecosystem. His past books have won numerous awards and accolades. He is at work on three more books.
In 2015, he was selected as the recipient of the Sierra Club’s prestigious Ansel Adams Award. This award honors an individual who has made superlative use of still photography to further conservation causes over a lifetime. In 2010, he was named “One of the 40 most influential nature photographers from around the globe” by Outdoor Photography Magazine in Great Britain. In 1980, he received an award from the Environmental Protection Agency, presented by Robert Redford, for his “important, exciting environmental photography and writing.”
Norton’s photographs and articles have appeared in most major magazines, including Time, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Natural History, Outside, The New York Times, Audubon, and many others across North America and Europe.
Throughout his fifty years of photography, writing and environmental activism, he has played a key role in the establishment of several wilderness areas in the Rocky Mountain region, new national parks in Alaska, and in the designation of Siberia’s Lake Baikal as a World Heritage Site. He has testified before numerous U.S. Senate and House hearings on wilderness and national park legislation. In 1991, he met with Russia’s Foreign Minister in the Kremlin to lobby for the protection of Lake Baikal.
Norton is currently leading the battle to save the Serengeti ecosystem from proposed damaging developments. He has been documenting the Serengeti for over thirty years, leading photo safaris and on book and magazine assignments.
He is a Charter Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers, and a founder and Fellow of the International League of Conservation Writers. He has also served on the Board of Trustees of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
Boyd describes this book as, “a call to action, proving the tools and encouragement to become a conservation photographer and to help you save wilderness and wildlife everywhere.”