The Importance of Importance

Conservation storytelling faces the electric chair

‘Then what would we be fighting for?’

Winston Churchill, when asked to cut funding for the arts to help the war effort.

The death of Allan, a young male lion poisoned in the Maasai Mara. Photographed for a National Geographic story on wildlife poisoning.

I received a long, frustrated voicemail message yesterday morning from my friend Simon Thomsett. Simon lives in Kenya, in an extended mud hut in a buffalo glade. He is brilliant and grumpy in equal measure, likely a genius, and is one of the world’s experts on raptors.  

Simon’s message laid out an issue that he has explained with great exhaustion to me, many times, but the situation is now getting worse. Raptors (eagles, falcons, hawks and others) are being electrocuted and killed on an industrial scale in Kenya, by badly designed power poles and isolators. It might sound like a niche problem but the statistics are catastrophic. Raptors are the fastest declining group of vertebrates on the planet today.

It's yet another depressing and totally avoidable issue facing the natural world. Simon’s message to me was “Please can you help raise awareness with National Geographic or some other media organisation. We have to do something urgently.”

My answer was ‘No’.

Yesterday evening I received a message from a photographer, through my website. She’d heard that I was doing a story for National Geographic magazine on cows and the extraordinary impact they have on the planet. She wanted to impress upon me the loss of bio-diversity in national forests in the US due to cattle and how the cosy relationship between ranchers, forest service and law enforcement meant that the continued persecution of cougars, wolves and other predators was being safeguarded by a system designed to favour cows. She asked if I could look into the issue and perhaps include it in the article.

My answer was ‘No’.

The cow story was killed, defunded to the point that it wasn’t possible to tell the true story of the animal with perhaps the second largest footprint on the planet after our own. It was a story of huge global importance, but one deemed not important enough. The days of telling important stories are apparently over. We are, instead, told that health stories rate well...‘please pitch them’.

It really hit home yesterday with those two requests, that there was nowhere left to turn anymore. I considered the New York Times or other broadsheets but knew the story of raptor electrocutions was too niche for them and the story of cows too big. National Geographic magazine has been the major supporter of environmental photojournalism and storytelling for decades. The culture created by its editors allowed us to take deep dives into stories that were more important than simply ratings. It allowed a group of highly dedicated individuals to pursue and expose truths, however unpalatable, about what we were doing to our planet and we took that responsibility with great seriousness, because we believed our magazine was important to humanity as a whole, and not just a yellow border on the news-stands put out to make money.

The sad truth is that most people don’t really want to read another bleak story about what we’re doing to the planet and so it has no commercial value. National Geographic magazine has already faced such a drop in readership that it has cancelled newsstand sales and now relies solely on subscriptions, through a system so fraught with problems that even I have cancelled it. Disney acquired it from Fox, incidental to a much larger deal, of which the magazine was a tiny percentage. Disney now has to either shutter it or turn a profit from it. So, it has laid off more staff, sixty in the most recent round, including its writers and text editors, leaving a gaping hole in its knowledge bank. Under previous management, photographers and picture editors collaborated closely, finding creative ways to fund their stories, to overcome budget short falls, but that sense of pride, comradery and investment has been swept away by the new editor, and replaced with, well, nothing... Just look at the Instagram feed these days, where are all the photographers? We rarely post anymore, why would we?

It is, in my opinion, a tragedy. Not only because the magazine was part of so many people’s lives across the US and the rest of the world, informing and educating them on so many issues and subjects, but because it was the last place left to tell the stories that may not have ‘commercial’ value, but needed to be told; and a team of smart, highly dedicated staff and freelancers took that responsibility very seriously, because it was that, which drove them.

Now we face a media landscape based more and more on the ethos of capitalism, where the stories we tell are designed for shock or mindless distraction. It makes sense in some ways, why invest money in stories that people don’t want? Isn’t it better to find subjects that rate well with the reader?

Well in my opinion the answer is simple ‘No’.

I once stood on stage at the Wildscreen Film Festival and got hissed by the audience when I suggested that we shouldn’t give people what they want, we should give people what they need. I stand by that idiom. Give people what they want and they go to McDonalds. Quite simply, what is the point of National Geographic magazine if it is not telling us the stories we need to be told?

For more information on raptor electrocution East Africa, please read this important piece - https://www.kenyabirdofpreytrust.org/post/how-electric-alternating-current-on-overhead-transmission-wires-kills-raptors-in-very-large-numbers