Brent Stirton is a senior staff photographer for Getty Images, a fellow of the National Geographic Society and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders programme. He specializes in documentary work focussed on humanitarian, environmental, health and conflict issues.
A four-man anti-poaching team permanently guards a northern white rhino in Ol Pejeta Conservancy, Kenya. A not-for-profit wildlife sanctuary, Ol Pejeta Conservancy is home to the world’s last remaining northern white rhino – the most endangered animal in existence.
As a teenager I really wasn’t very aware of what was going on in my own country. I grew up in South Africa in a fairly closeted environment so as I came of age and began to learn about how South Africa actually worked, it was quite a shock. And then I ended up doing my national service. At that time, there were conflicts in Angola and Mozambique, among other places, so that helped to open my eyes, along with working with a diverse range of people. I became so much more aware of what was actually going on and how important good journalism really was. I was in my early twenties when Nelson Mandela came out of prison in 1990, which was a really defining moment and at that point we had a lot of the foreign media coming over – that was my first exposure to the international photojournalism community. Then straight after that we had the genocide in Rwanda, the famines in Somalia, the fall of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and the ousting of Mobutu Sese Seko, so it was a whirlwind five years.
Women from an all-female conservation ranger force undergo sniper training in the bush to curb poaching in the Phundundu Wildlife Area, Zimbabwe. Called Akashinga, meaning the ‘brave ones’ in local dialect, it is a community-driven conservation model that empowers disadvantaged women to restore and manage a network of wilderness areas as an alternative to trophy hunting.
While I was doing my military service, I had a couple of friends who were photographers and their interest in photography made me interested. It was a sort of a meeting of two worlds; my eyes were opening to what was really happening in my country at that time and I was discovering this tool that was a truth-telling device. In South Africa at the time it was very difficult to work in the news because we only had Associated Press and Reuters and the roles there were very jealously protected, so I started working in other parts of Africa, just trying to be as mobile as possible. In 2003, off the back of a couple of World Press Photo wins, Getty Images called me and asked if I’d like to work for them as a staff photographer. And I think that was very fortunate, because they have, to a large extent, left me alone to do my thing, to work on my own themes. I’m an assignment photographer so if I am in Iraq, I’m there for a very specific story, I’m not embedding and following the news. I like doing jobs that involve a multiplicity of photographic disciplines; I spend six to seven months of the year working on conservation issues.
What ends up affecting me a lot is that this profession is quite predatory in a sense. You are coming into people’s lives, parachuting in there, spending a couple of weeks with them in these dire circumstances and then leaving and coming back to this life where you sit down with a cappuccino. That’s the reality of it and that definitely bothers me more and more. In terms of the conservation work, what’s hard with that is, for a lot of people, doing this work it’s a job – it’s a job in places where there are no jobs. The brotherhood and the sisterhood and the caring for our animals, comes later and it comes because you go through stuff together. There’s a famous expression that you don’t go to war for your country, you go to war for the man standing next to you. And that’s entirely true when it comes to conservation; I think a lot of stuff happens because of the person standing next to you.
American bow hunter Steve Sibrel hunts a lioness with professional South African hunter guides on a game farm in North West Province, South Africa. The hunting industry is a strong employer in Africa, with more than 18,000 hunters travelling to the continent every year.
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I came to conservation photojournalism in 2007. We were working in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and there had been a great deal of imagery that had come out of there and I think that people were, in general, tired of looking at it and thinking about it. I think human beings respond to the suffering of other human beings, but there’s a point where they are saturated with it, so then you have to find new ways to talk about things. So I went with Scott Johnson, the African bureau chief for Newsweek magazine at the time, to cover a group of conservation rangers inside Virunga National Park. The park is right in the heart of the conflict zone of the eastern Congo and it’s an area bigger than Israel. There were six hundred conservation rangers in there and since President Mobutu had fallen in 1997 they hadn’t been paid, but they were really just trying to keep this thing going. We went in there and our job was to cover the fifty rangers who were in a special group tasked with tackling what was, at the time, a rebel army, members of the Congolese army and around seventeen different paramilitary groups – all working inside this park. This is also the park where two million refugees fled from Rwanda into [former] Congo and Zaire, living there until they were gradually repatriated, but the hard core elements remained and became a militia movement.
Michael Oryem is a former Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) fighter who was involved in the poaching of ivory in Garamba National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo. Oryem was abducted by the LRA when he was nine and lived with them for over seventeen years in the wild. He defected and is now a member of the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF), the armed forces of Uganda, which attempts to locate and curb the activities of the LRA.
Conservation rangers from an anti-poaching unit work with locals to evacuate the body of a male silverback mountain gorilla killed along with six other adults and two babies in Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. It is suspected that political motivations linked to the local illegal charcoal industry were behind the killings. In 2020, sixteen people, including twelve rangers, were killed in an attack in the park carried out by rebels from the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda.
Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN) rangers conduct a raiding patrol near Goma in North Kivu province, Democratic Republic of Congo. They arrested a number of impoverished people from displaced communities, who are lured into the illegal charcoal industry by others who stand to benefit, including members of the Congolese military, armed rebel groups and business interests in Goma.
A few days into covering these rangers, we had word that some endangered gorillas had been killed. What I remember most from that incident was how seriously these rangers took it. They went and collected the bodies in the pouring rain and they found the bodies of four or five females, two of which were pregnant and one of which they knew had had a baby, but the baby was missing. The next morning we found the silverback and another couple of females and they transported the gorillas out, carrying the silverback in a really quite Christ-like way, like they were carrying a cross. I took some pictures and at one point I ran ahead of the procession and I built up some little rocks on a termite mound or something and I snapped three or four frames of these gorillas coming past. Then Scott and I heard that the Congolese army was looking for us because, as it turns out, they were involved in the killing of these gorillas – along with other people – so we crossed quickly into Rwanda, I filed the pictures and forgot about it. Then Newsweek turned it into a cover story and those photos got a lot of attention.
Those gorillas were killed because the rangers had been trying to stop a sort of ‘charcoal mafia’, which was made up of Tutsi businessmen and Congolese generals employing refugees who’d been displaced to go into the habitats of these gorillas and chop down the hardwood trees, which make the best charcoal. It was worth $40 million dollars annually. There were a couple of rangers who were sharp and saw what was going on and tried to stop it. The gorillas were killed as a warning to those rangers, a way of saying, ‘Look, if we can kill these animals so easily, don’t mistake what can happen to you’. I was really moved by the fact that these men felt so close to these animals and I also recognized that here was an intersection between exploiting the environment and also conflict; these elements were no longer separate. If you’re looking for members of a terrorist group or the like, you can find them in wild places. I don’t think of the environment as a separate issue in photojournalism anymore. Capitalism, commerce, humanity – it’s all related.
Caretakers interact with a newly orphaned mountain gorilla at Senkwekwe Centre, a mountain gorilla orphanage in Rumangabo, Democratic Republic of Congo.
The bottom line is these issues are complicated so I want to understand them better and I feel as though I’ve been very lucky to have some of the best print space in the world to talk about these issues – so I feel like I have to do it properly. Recently I did a story on the pangolin, which is one of those animals that gets overlooked but is a complete metaphor for all the species. We’re all very focused on the megafauna but there’s all these other things that are completely disappearing in their thousands on a daily basis. So working on the pangolin I was asking, ‘What is this about, what drives it? What are the potential solutions, who are the good guys, who are the bad guys?’ Zoonotic disease has been a reality of humans consuming animals from the beginning.
‘It’s almost suicidal in terms of our civilization’s thinking on these issues, but a lot of that’s because people are simply in the process of surviving, feeding their families. Conservation is almost considered a luxury, when it should be a necessity.’
A pangolin is slaughtered and prepared for a meal in a restaurant on the outskirts of Guangzhou, China. The price for the meal was RMB 1,200 [approximately US$170] per pound [450 grams] of the animal’s weight. This pangolin was six pounds [two and three-quarter kilograms] and was force-fed liquids before being weighed to drive the price higher. The price of the meal was RMB 8,000 [approximately US$1,130] in total.
An undercover officer from a unit dedicated to trans-national crime holds a giant pangolin exoskeleton discovered in a raid on a house in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
Pangolins have been identified as the most likely animal in the transmission of the Coronavirus; look how that has affected the world. China claimed to have shut down all their wildlife markets in the aftermath of the Coronavirus outbreak, but look at the cost, both in terms of human life and to the global economy, all because humans did not respect and treat animals correctly. This current disaster surely spells out that not everything is there for our consumption.
I think people do care about all of these issues if you take the time to explain it to them; you explain that these things don’t occur in isolation and they are all totally interconnected. If we allow this to happen with one species, it’s a really slippery slope for all species. I have a young son who is twenty months old and I like the idea that I can take him into the bush and show him this stuff. I challenge anyone to spend a few weeks in the bush and not understand that there is an underlying harmony to all things and if you simply spend time in that space, you will feel it. That’s the kind of balance that most people are missing in their lives.
Conservation is often at the bottom rung of priorities for government, but a lot of that’s because we haven’t established a proper value system for it. I’ve been privileged to spend a lot of time in wild places and it’s not always comfortable, but I definitely feel a more profound connection to things as a result of that – I wish I could give everyone in the world six weeks in a beautiful place so they could feel that. It’s very worrying that certain leaders come to power now, at a time when we have such a tiny window in which to conserve things. It’s almost suicidal in terms of our civilization’s thinking on these issues, but a lot of that’s because people are simply in the process of surviving, feeding their families. Conservation is almost considered a luxury, when it should be a necessity.
The raid netted two Vietnamese traffickers with 1,300 pounds [600 kilograms] of scales from the highly endangered pangolin.
There’s an interesting expression that the only Amazon that people seem to care about these days is the one that delivers packages in neat little boxes to their front door. I think it is in an interesting idea that commerce is the so-called engine of our civilization. But what we are not doing, is understanding that there is a green commerce too and we have dramatically undervalued this space. There has to come a time when investment in green space, in conservation, is also an economic possibility – look at the way that the German banks are thinking about pulling out of fossil fuels. And I’m hoping that that happens in time. But in a world that’s accelerating in terms of population, the idea that we could lose all these things without actually having arrived at a concrete value for them is astonishing. If we could put more energy into the here-and-now instead of trying to go to Mars, I feel we could do so much more.
I think we’re experiencing a profound selfishness in the world at this time. Leaders who are advocating the continued destruction of the planet through fossil fuels, or through mining practices that are completely unnecessary and purely profit-orientated – how do you go home and look at your kids?
Two rhino poachers wait to be processed in jail. They were apprehended by an anti-poaching team in Mozambique near the border of South Africa’s Kruger National Park.
Jin Mao Bone Carving Arts and Crafts in Beijing, China. This fifty-year-old ivory carving factory has thirty-four carvers and claims to do over fifty ‘big pieces’ every year. A ‘big piece’ is the equivalent of one tusk, as well as numerous smaller pieces. A large tusk weighs on average forty-five pounds [twenty kilograms] and sells in Beijing for approximately RMB 1 million [approximately US$140,000].
Trafficked ivory recovered from a seizure in Singapore is prepared for burning in Manyani, Tsavo, Kenya. Five of the nearly six and a half tons [approximately six tonnes] collected will be burnt in Kenya under the auspices of the Lusaka Agreement Task Force, a group which was formed by affiliated countries as a common front in the battle against wildlife crime in Africa. The remaining ivory will allegedly be sent back to Malawi and Zambia where it originally came from.
ICCN (Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature) conservation rangers deploy young bloodhounds to investigate the corpse of a recently killed sub-adult male elephant in Lulimbi, in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The lead dog Lily, just over a year old, followed the scent for several kilometres in the direction of a village long suspected in poaching cases in Virunga. Undercover intelligence could now seek out the ivory sellers.
Master sculptor Marcial Bernales carves an ivory head-and-hand set for a Catholic religious icon in his workshop in Valenzuela, near Manila, the Philippines. Bernales has been carving ivory for forty-five years and has made hundreds of pieces, all of which are of a religious nature. His ivory pieces are in great demand amongst the wealthy collectors of the Philippines.
It’s the triumph of the sociopath. The only way things are going to change is if we vote people out. One: we need people to go and vote like never before; and two: we need better leadership choices. We just don’t have these people who are out there thinking about these issues. So, if you really feel strongly, make yourself available. What I do is try to provide verifiable proof of what’s happening in the environmental space or in the field of human drama. But I want to give it to people I can believe in and it’s become difficult to see those people.
Too often leaders have partisan interests and their own personal agendas. For me, leadership is really about putting aside all that stuff and answering immediate needs. If you’re not doing that, you’re fiddling while Rome burns; it’s like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.
A dead black rhino bull, poached for its horns less than twenty-four hours earlier at Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Rhino horn was widely used in traditional Asian medicine and today is still considered curative for everything from cancer to kidney stones. It is now worth more than gold.
Rwandan rhino expert Kenny Babilon with a female black rhino in Chad. Of the six black rhinos originally brought from South Africa for release into Zakouma National Park, she is one of only two remaining. The other four died from differing complications of pneumonia, hypothermia, twisted gut and West Nile disease.
‘Conservation is often at the bottom rung of priorities for government, but a lot of that’s because we haven’t established a proper value system for it.’
I think that a dramatic re-evaluation of wild spaces from an economic perspective has a much greater chance of genuine consideration by politicians than economists, because ultimately ‘if it pays, it stays’. That’s the reality of the world we’re in: as we approach a population of eight billion people, that mentality is going to become the mainstay of our culture; democracy as we know it is going to change. But a reprioritizing of what natural spaces and animals mean and a genuine economic worth accorded to those things, is essential.
