Today is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Since we’re supposed to be spending it at home, I thought I would post about how, honestly, Earth Day begins at home.
There are thousands if not millions of special places and wild creatures that are under attack from one environmental threat or another. And we should do all that we can to protect them. But if we focus only on them, we run the risk of thinking that doing right by the environment is someone else’s problem.
For the past several months, I’ve been working on a project called Five Minutes in Nature. My plan was to introduce it to you now — the first full day of spring. But this is not how I planned to do it.
Five Minutes in Nature is about getting more people outdoors, appreciating the natural world five minutes at a time. The original idea was to help people get away from their screens.
Daylight Saving Time begins this weekend for most people. It's a sign spring is near, so I figure I have only a few days left to share images from this past winter. I met this moose in early January in the northeastern portion of Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. His pose and the snow-covered background make this one of my favorite images from that trip.
The bird population in North America has plunged by nearly a third over the past 50 years. That’s a loss of nearly 3 billion birds. And that’s even with regulations designed to protect vulnerable birds.
The losses could soon grow even worse. The Trump Administration now wants to essentially eliminate one of those protections: The Migratory Bird Treaty Act. You have only until March 19 to speak up to try to save it.
It seems crazy to spend the winter living on a mountaintop, but the wildlife of Yellowstone National Park do that every year. And they somehow manage to thrive. Life finds a way.
While I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve visited Yellowstone, I recently got a chance to make my first winter visit. I got the full experience. Nearly a foot of snow one night. Temperatures as cold as 9 below — Fahrenheit, not Celsius. And I developed a new respect for the animals that I’d photographed so many times before in less challenging weather conditions.
For more than a decade now, I’ve closed out each year by sharing a few of my favorite images from it. It’s part celebration. Ansel Adams once said that producing "twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop." But it’s also a great creative exercise. A careful review of your year’s work can help you see if you’re stuck in a rut or if you’ve found a direction that’s worth exploring further.
Comparing this year’s images with those that started the decade you can see that my favorite work is still a mix of landscape and wildlife, with a few detail pictures that try to express the essence of the subject. If there’s been one big change it is that the images in that latter category have grown more graphic and abstract.
At the rate things have been going, we’ll likely end this year with 36 million fewer trees. That’s how many trees vanish from urban areas in the U.S. annually.
And while it may seem like we’ve made great strides in conservation, this is one area where we don’t seem to be making much progress. The U.S. Forest Service study found that nearly half the states had significant declines in urban tree cover during the survey period. Just three states ended with more trees.
