Ami Vitale is a National Geographic photographer and film-maker. She has travelled to more than a hundred countries to document human and wildlife issues and through her work seeks to tell stories that create awareness and understanding between interhuman and human and animal communities.
John Nkuus Leripe, a Samburu, watches the sun rise over the Mathews Range in northern Kenya’s Namunyak Wildlife Conservancy. Samburu are semi-nomadic pastoralists and Leripe and other men like him who live here are proud stewards of the land and the wildlife it holds.
As I child I was painfully shy, gawky and introverted. I was afraid of people and that made it difficult to engage with the world around me. My parents did everything they could to give me more courage. They would put me in front of a camera, take me to dance classes and once even dressed me up as a lion – perhaps thinking I would find my courage that way. In spite of my parents’ good intentions none of these things instilled me with confidence, but the day I first picked up a camera, everything changed. Looking through the viewfinder, I found a world stripped of banality, a world full of wonder. Not only did photography enable me to see the world with fresh eyes, it allowed me to shift attention away from myself and focus on others. My camera gave me the ability to share and amplify other people’s stories and this, I later came to realize, is my hidden superpower.
Photography, both as a medium and as a means of communicating stories, has a unique ability to transcend all languages and to help us understand each other. It reminds us of our deep connections and can be used as a tool for creating awareness and understanding across cultures; a tool for making sense of our commonalities in the world we share.
A group of Samburu stand looking over the Namunyak Wildlife Conservancy from the Mathews Range Mountains in northern Kenya. Namunyak’s 850,000 square acres [344,000 square hectares] contain higher populations of large mammals than any other landscape, protected or unprotected, in Kenya. Conservation efforts here are led by the local communities and focus on preventing habitat loss and stopping the spread of poaching.
‘We all have the capacity to get engaged and use our voices to make a difference. The messenger matters just as much as the message itself. Each of us can be a powerful voice when speaking to the people in our lives.’
I have worked in over one hundred countries documenting stories about war, security, poverty and health. What has slowly emerged from covering conflict after conflict and the worst of human tragedies, is a conviction that these stories about the human condition cannot be separated from stories about the natural world. We inhabit an intricate web and the outcome of almost every story is always dependent on nature. Today, I use nature as a foil to talk about our home – its past, its present and its future. In a field that tends to emphasize difference and focus on conflict, my mission has been to tell stories that remind us of our interconnectedness, of how much we share, rather than simply emphasize our differences.
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One of the great turning points in my life came in 2000 when I was living in a remote village in the small West African country of Guinea-Bissau for half a year. My sister had spent some time there in the Peace Corps not long after the country was wracked by the Guinea-Bissau Civil War which took place there from June 1998 to May 1999. I wanted to go back and see what had happened to the people my sister had befriended while there; I wanted to understand how the war had impacted them. So I packed my bags and headed to a small village in the middle of the country for a two-week stay. Once there, I shared a mud hut with Fatima and Uma, two co-wives and their children. As I got to know Fatima and Uma and slowly became familiar with the rhythm of village, the two weeks I had allowed for my visit quickly turned into months and those months turned into half a year.
What I learned while there surprised me. In mainstream media, there are two prevailing narratives for Africa. On the one hand, there is a continent plagued by war, famine and disease; on the other, there is the Africa of safaris and exotic animals. What I encountered was neither of these. I encountered something far more complex. I encountered a story that I rarely saw portrayed in the mainstream media. I encountered a community with a deep connection to the natural world. There was a reverence and understanding that people’s lives depended on nature. The village didn’t have running water or electricity and there were no doctors, but I quickly realized that even if I was given an entire lifetime, I would not be able to learn everything that Fatima and Uma had to teach. To them, I was a mystery. I did not have a baby nor a husband, I could barely cook and I couldn’t even get water out of the well. They could not understand how I had survived for so long without these basic skills for living. I spent the days learning how the majority of people on this planet live; I carried water and gathered firewood. In times of plenty, we shared a large bowl of rice; in times of scarcity, we subsisted just on the one cup of rice a day.
As the rainy season began, I became sick. I began hallucinating and could not get up because my body was so weak. Uma and Fatima immediately brought in a local healing practitioner, who produced amulets for me. These objects were small leather pouches containing carefully folded parchments with verses from the Koran, as well as symbols and geometrical patterns.
Anita and Sri Devi stand in a rice field in their village in Andhra Pradesh, India. Each day, women around the world spend a collective two hundred million hours collecting water for their communities and families and are not able to develop their own skills because of the time this takes. This pursuit becomes more difficult and time-consuming as climate change causes more frequent and severe droughts and as sea level rise contaminates other sources of fresh water.
An orphaned baby reticulated giraffe embraces wildlife keeper, Lekupania. This giraffe was rehabilitated and returned to the wild, as others have done before him. Right now, giraffe are undergoing what has been referred to as ‘a silent extinction’. Current estimates are that giraffe populations across Africa have dropped forty per cent in three decades, plummeting from approximately 155,000 in the late 1980s, to under 100,000 today.
Ntipiyon Nonguta and her son, Bernard, aged one, relax with their neighbours as they make beaded belts for the Loisaba Community Trust in Ewaso Village, Laikipia, Kenya. Much needed attention has been focussed on the plight of wildlife and fighting the war on poachers, but little has been said about the indigenous communities that are on the frontlines of these poaching wars. The best protectors of these landscapes are the local communities themselves.
The healer told me to tie the leather straps around my arm and wear the amulets until I felt better – I never took them off while I was there. They also gave me medicine to treat malaria and within days I was better. I have carried these amulets with me across a hundred countries over twenty years of travelling. For me, they represent more than protection against disease and danger. They are an expression of empathy and a story of our shared humanity.
We often visit a place with the story already written in our heads even before we arrive. Guinea-Bissau taught me that it takes time to understand one another’s stories but that once we do, we are transformed forever.
My life in Guinea-Bissau was vastly different from my life in America. That was not really surprising – in fact, it was expected. What was truly surprising were all the things that we shared. My last evening in the village, I sat with a group of children beneath a sea of stars, talking into the night about my return home. One of the children, Alio, asked me if we had a moon in America. I think of Alio every time I gaze at a full moon and I imagine him standing under that big sea of stars looking up at it. The moon is like a collective third eye. It shows us our common identity – an identity that knows no borders. It gives us a sense of oneness, a constant reminder that we are all tied together in an intricate web, whether we understand it or not.
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Naitemu Letur pushes a jug of water back to her home. ‘Before, we would walk for hours every day just to get water,’ she says. ‘Sometimes it was not safe, but now we have plenty of water near our homes and this has made our lives more secure.’ In earlier conservation efforts, threatened forests and endangered species were protected by uniformed guards. Here, they are protected by women and schoolchildren, who have a vested interest in a healthy environment because they benefit directly.
I can recall the exact moment when I truly began to understand how profound our choices are and the impact we have on one another and on all of life on this planet. It happened on a cold, snowy day in December 2009 in the village of Dvůr Králové nad Labem in the Czech Republic. It was on this day that I met a rhino named Sudan for the first time. Quite unexpectedly, this animal changed the way I see the world forever. What surprised me was how connected I felt to the gentle, hulking creature sitting in front of me. When I got close to him, I had the strange feeling that I had just met a unicorn. He was mythical and other-worldly, larger than life. I recognized I was in the presence of a sentient, ancient creature. His species has been roaming the planet for millions of years and up until the last hundred years, there were possibly hundreds of thousands of them inhabiting the planet.
But on that day in 2009, there were only eight of these rhinos alive and they were all in zoos. I was there because there was a plan to airlift four of these last eight northern white rhinos from the zoo in the Czech Republic to Kenya. At first, I thought it was a story straight out of Disney cartoon, but I quickly realized that this was a desperate, last ditch effort to save an entire species. When I saw these creatures, it seemed so incomprehensibly unfair that we had reduced them to this remnant of what they had been.
We imagine wildlife roaming the open plains of Africa freely. The reality is that they have to be guarded and protected around the clock, twenty-four-seven, by heavily militarized guards. For hundreds of years, rhino horn has been used by people around the world to treat illnesses, such as fever and stroke. Traditionally fervently believed to have miraculous healing powers, rhino horn is actually just composed of keratin – the same material our fingernails and hair are made of. Nevertheless, today rhinos continue to be killed for their horns. The horn is so valuable, it can be sold on the black market for three times the price of gold. Illegal poaching is one of the primary reasons that rhinos are so rare today. We are witnessing extinction right now, on our watch. Poaching is not slowing down and it’s entirely possible, even likely, that if the current trajectory of killing continues, elephants and rhinos, along with a host of lesser-known plains animals, will be functionally extinct in our lifetime.
Sudan, the last living male northern white rhino left on earth, is comforted by keeper Joseph Wachira, moments before he passed away on 19 March 2018, at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in northern Kenya. At the time, the photographer said, ‘To watch the last of something die is something I hope never to experience again, but Sudan was surrounded by love, together with the people who committed their lives to protecting him. If there is any meaning in his death, it’s that Sudan can be our final wake up call.’
In 2014, the photographer witnessed a group of Samburu warriors encounter a rhino for the first time in their lives, at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya. Some of the warriors had never even seen a photo of a rhino. The young warriors from Northern Rangelands Trust community conservancies had been visiting to learn about conservation practices such as sustainable land use, grazing programmes and endangered species conservation.
Much-needed attention has been focused on the plight of wildlife, but very little has been said about the indigenous communities on the frontlines of the poaching wars. They hold the key to saving Africa’s great animals. The best protectors of these animals are the people who live alongside of them.
Human activity has placed one million plant and animal species in immediate danger of extinction, causing what scientists have identified as the sixth mass extinction event on this planet.5 This extinction event is different – not only is it driven by humans, but it is happening at an incredibly fast and accelerating rate. Removal of a keystone species has a huge effect on the ecosystem and impacts all of us. These wildlife giants are part of a complex world created over millions of years and their survival is intertwined with our own survival. Without rhinos, elephants and other wildlife, we all will suffer in ways we do not yet fully comprehend.
Kamara is nuzzled by orphaned black rhino Kilifi who he hand-raised, along with two other baby rhinos, at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya. Kamara spends twelve hours every day watching over the vulnerable orphaned animals. This area was once home to one of the densest black rhino populations. Today, most locals have never seen a rhino in their life. In just two generations this animal has been poached almost to extinction.
Fast forward to 18 March 2018, where I was giving a talk in London when I received a call to hurry back to Kenya. I had made a number of trips to visit Sudan in his new home in Kenya, but this time it would be different. This time I was travelling there to say goodbye to Sudan – goodbye to the last northern white male alive on the planet. To watch the last of something die is something I hope never to experience again. On the flight to Kenya, I worked through the many emotions I felt at the thought of saying goodbye to the Sudan that I had come to know over the last several years. I could employ my powers of rationalization and tell myself that he had had a good and long life. I have lost those close to me before and as difficult and heart-wrenching as it would be, I knew that I would slowly be able to come to terms with saying goodbye. What I could not begin to wrap my mind around, what I could not come to terms with, was the enormity of what it meant to say goodbye to a species. Learning how to grieve for a species may be a uniquely brutal and heartbreaking lesson that is specific to our generation.
I arrived and Sudan was surrounded by the people who loved him and had protected him. All I could hear was one bird wildly chirping against the backdrop of the quiet, muffled sobs of his keepers. They spend more time protecting these animals than they do with their own children. This gentle, hulking creature was the last of a species who had survived for millions of years, but he couldn’t survive us; he couldn’t survive humankind.
Mpala, an orphaned elephant cared for at Reteti Elephant Sanctuary for the previous two-and-a-half years, is finally returned to the wild. Three-year-old Mpala arrived when she was seven months old, a victim of the drought. She integrated into the herd quickly. Her place was in the middle of it all – if there was a ruckus to be had, she was throwing back her trunk and rumbling in the muck, enjoying a refreshing mud bath.
Samburu warriors found this baby elephant, dubbed Kinya, trapped in a hand-dug well. When her herd didn’t return for her, they took her to Reteti Elephant Sanctuary where she was cared for by keepers such as Rimland Lemojong, pictured with her here. Despite being rescued, Kinya died weeks later.
The highly trained wildlife keepers at Reteti Elephant Sanctuary work to comfort rescued elephants who have been orphaned or abandoned by the wild herds that live near the Namunyak Wildlife Conservancy in northern Kenya. Elephant calves are often orphaned or abandoned due to poaching, human-made wells, drought, human-wildlife conflict and natural mortality. Reteti’s goal is to rehabilitate these calves and return them to the wild herds.
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Let this be our wake-up call. In a world of almost eight billion people, we must begin to see our world as part of the natural world; the natural world as part of our world. Our fates are linked. Losing one part of nature is a loss for all of nature. Without rhinos and elephants and other wildlife we suffer more than just the loss of ecosystem health. We suffer a loss of imagination, a loss of wonder, a loss of beautiful possibilities.
Planet earth is the only home we have and together we have poked some holes in our shared little life raft. I want everyone to experience and benefit from the diversity of habitat and life we have today in all of its forms – from glaciers to deserts, from elephants to the tiniest of ants that inhabit the earth. We must not condemn future generations to a world bereft of these experiences.
What happens next is in all of our hands. Nature is resilient if we give it a chance – if we give it our time. We all have the capacity to get engaged and use our voices to make a difference. The messenger matters just as much as the message itself. Each of us can be a powerful voice when speaking to the people in our lives.
Mary Lengees, one of the first female elephant keepers at Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in northern Kenya, caresses Suyian, the sanctuary’s first resident. Suyian was rescued in September 2016 when she was just four weeks old. To date, Reteti has rescued more than thirty-five elephants and reintroduced six back into the wild. Those who have returned to the wild have quickly reintegrated into wild herds in the area, the most hoped for outcome.
I believe we must first fall in love with the world around us. Love gives us the courage to make a difference. But I know it’s not just about loving this planet; in fact, that’s not going to save us. What’s going to save us is believing in the wonder of this world. Wonder allows us to go beyond routine ways of thinking and to reimagine our future together, to reimagine a world graced by rhinos. Wonder shows us how deeply connected we are to one another and that our choices are profound in their impact. Once you take that brave first step and allow yourself to fall in love, you open yourself to the experience of wonder. It is inexplicable and it changes everything. This is what happened to a few of us when we met a rhino named Sudan.
When Alio asked me if we had a moon in America, he taught me this universal truth: we, all of us together, form an intricate web. We are bound to each other simply by virtue of who and what we are. We all want to be on the right side of history and that can only happen when we realize that history is our story and our story is the story of every living thing on this planet. We must not fall into the trap of thinking that this issue is too big to deal with, or that someone else will take care of it. It is up to you. It is up to me. It is up to us.
Ye Ye, a sixteen-year-old giant panda, lounges in a wild enclosure at a conservation centre at the Wolong National Nature Reserve, managed by the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda. Her name, whose characters represent Japan and China, celebrates the friendship between the two nations.
