#biodiversity project

[brookdubois]

The Biodiversity Project

The goal of the Biodiversity Project is simple: to show what’s at stake, and to get people to care, while there’s still time to save them.  More than 1,800 species have been photographed to date, with more to come.

[wigmund]

The animal pictures I've been posting recently are from a project by Joel Sartore and National Geographic known as the Biodiversity Project.

For many of Earth’s creatures time is running out. There are simply too many humans now, more than seven billion. All of us consume resources and space. Wildlife just can’t compete.

The concept behind the Biodiversity Project is simple: to show what’s at stake in terms of species loss and to get people to care while there’s still time.

In zoos, in private collections, and in the field with biologists around the world, I’m trying to photograph as many species as I can by using a portable studio with black and white backgrounds. I’ve been at this quite a while now and have captured nearly 1,800 in the past five years. That’s not nearly enough, but it’s a start. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be visiting several zoos over the next month, hoping to add at least 25 species to the project. The subjects will range from turtles to tigers and everything in between.

This black-and-white background technique gives all species equal weight and importance. A tiny beetle is as interesting as a lion, and a two-toed sloth as cuddly as a panda bear. The clean background, combined with nice light, allows the viewer to look every species in the eye, the window to the soul. I hope these portraits will connect with viewers and get them to understand that all creatures have at least a consciousness as well as a basic right to exist.

Experts say that half the world’s plant and animal species are now threatened with extinction. My job is to get you to look at them in a new way, to understand that all of this complexity and beauty has been shaped by millions of years of evolution. It would be a crime to doom even one of these species to extinction. It may also threaten our very existence. It is folly to think that we can doom everything else to extinction but that we’ll be just fine.

The time to do this is right now, while zoos still have a substantial “inventory.” Many animals simply don’t breed well in captivity, and so in the past we’ve been able to get replacements from the wild. For some species, we just can’t do that anymore. The captives are all that are left.

There’s no time to lose.

You can read through all of the dispatches starting here and this is also in conjunction with Sartore's book RARE.

[horsesandpyramids]

[horsesandpyramids]