Notes — Ami Vitale on Photojournalism and Wildlife Conservation

Notes on Ami Vitale in conversation with Tyler Cowen — Conversations with Tyler (https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/ami-vitale/), 7 February 2024 (recorded 1 November 2023).

Four questions [Adler frame]

Q1 — What is it about as a whole? A National Geographic photographer’s account of two careers that turned out to be one: roughly a decade of conflict photojournalism (Kosovo, Gaza, Kashmir) followed by a shift into wildlife and conservation photography (pandas, northern white rhinos, Kenyan elephants), joined by her realisation that resource scarcity and ecological stress sit behind most of the conflicts she covered. The conversation moves from concrete conservation mechanics — panda breeding, rhino embryo science, Kenya’s anti-poaching model — into the ethics of the camera itself: who has the right to take a picture, and of whom.

Q2 — How is it argued? Almost entirely from field experience rather than theory — specific programmes she has worked inside (Reteti Elephant Sanctuary, the BioRescue project, panda rewilding in China) supply the evidence, and she is candid when a question exceeds her expertise (panda diplomacy, the Sontag quotation) rather than reaching for a general theory. Cowen’s questions are mostly concrete and comparative (film versus digital, welfare versus environmentalist positions, Kenya versus other countries), which keeps the exchange close to cases throughout.

Q3 — Is it true, in whole or part? The programme-level claims she reports firsthand — the goat-milk discovery at Reteti, Kenya’s zero pandemic-era rhino poaching against South Africa’s 400-plus, the BioRescue project’s 29 viable embryos — are stated as direct experience or widely reported facts and read as credible. [?] Some figures are recalled loosely (‘I believe it was in the ’60s’ for the Dvůr Králové Zoo transfer; the 30 to 90 per cent panda-survival figures given as approximate). Her broader claims — that ecological stress underlies ‘almost always’ the conflicts she has covered, that all captive-animal situations are not equivalent — are stated with more confidence than the conversation supplies evidence for; they read as testimony from experience rather than measured argument, which the Four Questions frame is designed to flag rather than dismiss.

Q4 — What of it? Supplies the wiki’s first sustained treatment of community-led (as opposed to enforcement-led) conservation, and a firsthand account of de-extinction science’s practical near-term application to species still alive, not just extinct ones. Alongside Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures, it starts a small cluster on the ethics of photographing people and animals outside one’s own community — permission, exploitation, and who gets to author a story.

Glossary

BioRescue project — the international consortium using assisted reproduction (IVF from stored eggs, southern white rhino surrogates) to prevent northern white rhino extinction; as of the conversation it held 29 viable embryos created from the genetic material of the two surviving females, one of whom supplied most of the eggs used. [§ De-extinction, BioRescue, and keystone species]

Reteti Elephant Sanctuary — Africa’s first indigenous-owned elephant sanctuary, run by the Samburu community in northern Kenya; the first in the region to employ women as elephant keepers, and the source of the goat-milk discovery that raised orphaned-calf survival from 50 to 98 per cent. [§ Kenya’s community-led conservation model]

Milk mamas — the Samburu women who supply goat milk to Reteti Elephant Sanctuary as a substitute for imported powdered formula; the arrangement gave many of them their first bank accounts and a new income source. [§ Kenya’s community-led conservation model]

Parachute journalism — Vitale’s term for covering a conflict by dropping in briefly rather than living with it, which she concluded early in her career could not do a story justice — the reasoning behind her four years based in Kashmir. [§ A decade in conflict photojournalism]

Keystone species — a species whose presence or absence disproportionately shapes an ecosystem’s health; Vitale’s working example is elephants and rhinos in northern Kenya, whose decades-long local absence visibly degraded the landscape and whose return produced recovery within five to ten years. [§ De-extinction, BioRescue, and keystone species]

Vital Impacts — the nonprofit Vitale founded to support arts education and conservation storytelling worldwide, including efforts to put cameras directly into the hands of the communities she has historically photographed. [§ Photographic ethics, authorship, and the future of the image]

Key claims by section

Pandas: captivity, breeding, and diplomacy [§ Pandas: captivity, breeding, and diplomacy]

Panda keepers wear urine-scented panda costumes so captive-born pandas destined for the wild never grow comfortable around humans, since pandas navigate primarily by smell.
Cub survival rose from roughly 30 per cent in the 1960s to about 90 per cent today, which Vitale attributes to public affection for pandas translating into harsher poaching penalties, a captive breeding programme that eventually succeeded, and reforestation reconnecting habitat corridors.
The ‘pandas lack a sex drive’ idea is a myth: breeders had missed that females are fertile only a few days a year and require mate choice; once understood, captive breeding succeeded after two unsuccessful decades.
Pandas were ‘gifted’ abroad from the outset (the first to Nixon) as a diplomatic tool; Vitale treats their international allocation as China’s prerogative and a barometer of bilateral relations, not a technical question.

Captivity, sentience, and the case for zoos [§ Captivity, sentience, and the case for zoos]

Vitale defends captivity pragmatically, not ideologically: northern white rhinos would already be extinct without a 1960s-era transfer of wild rhinos into the Dvůr Králové Zoo. [?]
She holds that not all zoos or captive situations are equivalent, and cites growing recognition of animal sentience (Jane Goodall’s work; a researcher’s account of dolphins registering another’s suffering as their own) as reason to keep revising how captivity is judged.
On the animal-welfare-versus-environmentalist debate over predators and intervention, she declines a general position, and separately opposes reintroducing species to landscapes absent for millions of years — while treating recently displaced keystone species as a different case.

De-extinction, BioRescue, and keystone species [§ De-extinction, BioRescue, and keystone species]

Vitale’s initial view of Colossal Biosciences’ woolly mammoth project — ‘a waste of money and insane’ — changed after meeting the team and hearing the ecological case, modelled on wolves restored to Yellowstone: mammoths could churn Arctic soil and graze in ways that restore degraded landscapes.
She rates the company’s more consequential near-term work as its BioRescue partnership, which produced 29 viable northern white rhino embryos by adding genetic diversity drawn from museum specimens — the same underlying technique as the mammoth project.
In northern Kenya, 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, which she offers as the general case for keystone-species restoration.

Kenya’s community-led conservation model [§ Kenya’s community-led conservation model]

Kenya shifted from mass elephant and rhino poaching several decades ago to a state where climate change, not poaching, is now the primary threat to wildlife.
Community engagement, not policing alone, drives the shift: during the pandemic, when tourism collapsed and poaching spiked elsewhere in the region (over 400 rhinos poached in South Africa), Kenya recorded zero rhino poaching.
Coexistence carries real costs — elephants can destroy months of crops in a day — and Vitale credits government support for affected communities as part of what sustains the model.
Reteti Elephant Sanctuary, run by the Samburu, is Africa’s first indigenous-owned elephant sanctuary and the first in the region to employ women as elephant keepers; its goat-milk discovery raised orphaned-calf survival from 50 to 98 per cent while keeping money once spent on imported formula inside the community.

A decade in conflict photojournalism [§ A decade in conflict photojournalism]

Vitale covered Kosovo and Gaza before spending four years based in Kashmir on the India–Pakistan conflict, having concluded early that briefly parachuting into conflicts could not do a story justice.
She names the people she met — the best of humanity alongside its worst — rather than adrenaline as what kept her returning across ten years.
By year nine she considered quitting; what kept her going was seeing that images other journalists were not covering could shift international debate. Year ten brought a deliberate break.
A conservation organisation’s forestry commission during that break led directly into her northern white rhino reporting — the point she marks as her ‘profound awakening’ that resource scarcity and climate stress underlie nearly every conflict she had covered. [?]
She argues journalism’s convention of showing only violence, never the people working toward solutions, is a failure of the craft, not an inevitability.

Photographic ethics, authorship, and the future of the image [§ Photographic ethics, authorship, and the future of the image]

The ‘Afghan Girl’ photograph, recently complicated by accounts of the trauma it caused its subject, is Vitale’s caution about photographing outside one’s own community: obtaining a subject’s blessing matters as much as technical skill.
She agrees with Susan Sontag’s characterisation of photography as ‘a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power’, and asks ‘what gives me the right to be taking this picture?’ before every frame.
Through Vital Impacts she works to put cameras directly into the hands of the communities she covers, so authorship shifts towards subjects rather than remaining solely with outside photographers.
She does not mourn film’s replacement by digital, citing chemical waste and slow historical transmission speeds, but is far more concerned about AI-driven image manipulation eroding trust in photographic authenticity — a problem she expects camera makers 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 or self-assurance.