Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/903079
circling serenely above me. In Mexico, I have turned my gaze upward to see thousands of monarch butterflies filling the sky like golden confetti. This journey has made it clear to me that we cannot just pluck animals from their native environment and put them on an ark to protect their future, without considering the significance of the habitat they have been taken from. Community-based conservation, therefore, has a more important role to play now than ever before; with increasing economic inequality in the world, it can enable people to maintain their livelihoods while protecting their natural heritage. In all of this, I have been informed by studies regarding animal imagery and how powerful their impact is upon our hearts, minds, and souls. In traditional wildlife photography, animals are seen in their environment—wild and free—and thus the sense of "otherness" (and of their separation from humans) is enhanced. However, Kalof, Zammit-Lucia, and Kelly's thought provoking 2011 study on the meaning of animal portraiture in a museum setting has shown that "placing animal representations in a visual context that is usually associated with human representation had the effect of enhancing feelings of kinship." Dr. George Schaller, one of the world's most respected biologists, has said: "You can do the best science in the world but unless emotion is involved it's not really very relevant. Conservation is based on emotion. It comes from the heart and one should never forget that." I think this is particularly true when communicating visually; we must be emotionally touched to spur us into action. With that in mind, this book is something of an experiment: I have tried to bridge that otherness and instead invite sameness by creating portraits of animals that emphasize their personality, while incorporating abstracts and landscapes that show the material aspects of their ecosystems. People now talk about the Anthropocene epoch. They say that we have moved away from a world shaped by the flux of natural forces to one that is being shaped predominantly by humankind. This is a theory backed by powerful scientific evidence, and one that is guiding many creative and academic disciplines today. The idea that the natural world is vulnerable has only entered the modern general consciousness in the last few decades. Throughout history, nature has been considered an immeasurably vast and infinitely bountiful resource; but today the power structures have changed, and the natural world depends on us as much as we depend on it. The title of this book is Endangered, but the question is: to whom does that apply?