Ami Vitale on Photojournalism and Wildlife Conservation
National Geographic photographer and film-maker Ami Vitale talks with Tyler Cowen about panda and rhino conservation, why she left a decade of conflict photojournalism, the ethics of photographing other people’s suffering, and what community-led conservation in Kenya gets right that the West still does not understand.
Key ideas
- Community ownership, not policing alone, saved Kenya’s wildlife. Kenya’s shift from mass poaching to near-zero losses — zero rhinos poached during the pandemic, against over 400 in South Africa — rests on communities understanding wild animals as essential to their own survival, not on stricter laws in isolation.
- Conflict and ecological collapse are the same story. A decade covering wars in Kosovo, Gaza, and Kashmir taught Vitale that scarcity of water, fertile land, and a changing climate sit behind nearly every human conflict; she now treats conservation and conflict journalism as one beat, not two.
- A photograph is a claim on the world, and claiming it carries an obligation. Vitale asks ‘what gives me the right to be taking this picture?’ before every frame, and argues photography can be exploitative and colonial as easily as it can give voice — permission and relationship come first.
- De-extinction science has near-term value even if headline species never return. She was sceptical of bringing back the woolly mammoth until she saw the same genetic-diversity techniques applied to the BioRescue project’s 29 viable northern white rhino embryos — the mammoth project’s real output may be tools for species still alive.
- Keystone species restoration heals landscapes on a human timescale. Reintroducing elephants and rhinos to parts of northern Kenya where they had been locally extinct for decades produced visible ecosystem recovery within five to ten years — evidence, to her, of how resilient nature is when given the chance.
Content
Pandas: captivity, breeding, and diplomacy
The conversation opens on the mechanics of panda conservation. Keepers wear panda costumes scented with panda urine when handling captive-born pandas destined for rewilding, because pandas navigate by smell rather than sight and must never grow comfortable around humans, one of the greatest threats to wild animals generally. Vitale credits the rise in panda cub survival — from roughly 30 per cent in the 1960s to about 90 per cent today — to three factors: China’s success in making the world (and, more importantly, people living closest to pandas) fall in love with the species, harsher poaching penalties, and reforestation that reconnects habitat corridors so pandas can move during droughts and bamboo die-offs. On the supposed evolutionary puzzle of pandas’ low fertility, she calls the ‘sexless species’ idea a myth: breeders had missed that females are fertile for only a few days a year and require mate choice, not habitat difficulty alone; once keepers understood both constraints, captive breeding succeeded. On the diplomatic allocation of pandas among zoos, she defers to China as owner: pandas were ‘gifted’ as a diplomatic tool from the outset — the first went to Nixon — and remain, in her reading, a barometer of international relations rather than a matter for outside adjudication.
Captivity, sentience, and the case for zoos
Asked whether animals have privacy rights, Vitale says she wishes captivity were never necessary but defends it pragmatically: northern white rhinos would already be extinct without the Dvůr Králové Zoo’s 1960s-era transfer of wild rhinos into captivity. She holds that all zoos and captive situations are not equivalent, and that growing scientific recognition of animal sentience — citing Jane Goodall’s work and a researcher’s account of dolphin empathy extending to shared suffering — should change how humans understand captivity’s costs. Her broader hope is that humans evolve the same capacity she has witnessed in orphaned elephant herds: recognising another’s suffering as one’s own. On the long-running animal-welfare-versus-environmentalist debate over predators and intervention, she declines to take a general position, arguing each conservation story has its own answer and that she generally opposes reintroducing species to landscapes they have been absent from for millions of years — while distinguishing that from restoring recently displaced keystone species.
De-extinction, BioRescue, and keystone species
Vitale’s stance on Colossal Biosciences’ plan to revive the woolly mammoth shifted after meeting the team: her initial view — ‘a waste of money and insane’ — gave way once she understood the ecological argument, modelled on wolves restored to Yellowstone, that mammoths could churn soil and graze in ways that restore degraded Arctic landscapes, much as bison do in Montana. She rates the company’s more consequential near-term work as its partnership with the BioRescue project, which has produced 29 viable embryos for the two remaining northern white rhino females (using southern white rhino surrogates) by drawing added genetic diversity from museum specimens — the same technique underlying the mammoth project. She grounds the broader keystone-species argument in northern Kenya, where landscapes that lost elephants and rhinos to local extinction for roughly 30 years visibly deteriorated, and recovered within five to ten years once the animals returned — elephants, she notes, functioning as ‘huge mobile composting units’ that regenerate grassland and draw other species back.
Kenya’s community-led conservation model
Kenya is, for Vitale, wildlife conservation’s clearest recent success story: a shift from mass elephant and rhino poaching several decades ago to a state where climate change, not poaching, is now the primary threat. She attributes this less to policing than to community engagement — during the pandemic, when tourism collapsed and poaching spiked across the region (over 400 rhinos poached in South Africa), Kenya recorded zero rhino poaching, because communities had come to see wild animals as essential to their own survival and livelihoods, not only to conservation abstractly. She is candid that coexistence has real costs — elephants can destroy months of crops in a day — and credits Kenyan government efforts to support affected communities as part of what sustains the model. She singles out the Samburu community’s Reteti Elephant Sanctuary, Africa’s first indigenous-owned elephant sanctuary and the first to employ women as elephant keepers in a patriarchal society, as an example of conservation reshaping social structure as much as ecology. During a pandemic-driven supply shortage of the powdered milk formula used to wean orphaned elephant calves, Reteti discovered that goat milk — sourced from local women, the ‘milk mamas’ — served as a substitute, raising calf survival from 50 to 98 per cent while keeping money that once left the country, spent on imported formula, inside the community.
A decade in conflict photojournalism
Vitale spent roughly ten years as a conflict photographer, beginning in Kosovo and Gaza and settling for four years in Kashmir to cover the India–Pakistan conflict, having concluded early that ‘parachute journalism’ — hopping between conflicts without dwelling in any of them — could not do a story justice. She names the people she met, not adrenaline, as what kept her returning: even in places that showed the worst of humanity, she also found its best. By year nine she was, in her words, broken and seriously considering quitting; what stopped her was recognising the power of returning images that other journalists were not covering back into international debate. Year ten brought a deliberate break, during which a conservation organisation commissioned forestry work that led directly into her northern white rhino reporting — the moment she connects to her ‘profound awakening’ that conflict and ecological stress are the same underlying story: scarcity of water, fertile land, and a destabilising climate recur across nearly every conflict she covered. She argues journalism’s convention of showing only violence, never the people working toward solutions, is itself a failure of the craft.
Photographic ethics, authorship, and the future of the image
Vitale treats the ‘Afghan Girl’ photograph — recently complicated by accounts of the trauma it caused its subject — as a caution about photographing outside one’s own community: obtaining a subject’s blessing and understanding context matters as much as technical skill, since photography can be exploitative and colonial as readily as it can give voice. She agrees with Susan Sontag’s description of photography as ‘a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power’, and now works to put cameras directly into the hands of the communities she covers so they can tell their own stories rather than relying solely on outside authorship. On the shift from film to digital, she does not mourn film’s loss — citing the chemical waste and slow transmission speeds of analogue work — but is far more concerned about AI-driven image manipulation and the erosion of trust in what counts as an authentic photograph, a problem she expects camera manufacturers and software companies such as Adobe to address through provenance verification. Asked what she looks for in emerging photographers, she names ethics and empathy over technical confidence, and describes her own transformation from a shy, easily-dismissed beginner into a public speaker as a direct result of learning that the story, not the storyteller, is what matters.
See also
- Ami Vitale — speaker
- Tyler Cowen — host
- Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures — a fellow photojournalist on photography’s power to distort as much as to record, and on the ethics of photographing outside one’s own culture