Art Wolfe

When I was growing up in the suburbs of Seattle in the 1950s and 1960s, nature was all around me. My earliest memories are of playing in local woodlots, collecting frogs, and watching birds. I moved on to hiking in the nearby Cascade Range and Olympic Mountains. But over the years, all those magical woodlots of my youth have been devoured by development, and the air and water degraded.

My latest project, The Living Wild, is my forty-second book. To complete it, I embarked on a three-year odyssey to photograph the world's icon animals-those that best represent their ecosystems. I wanted to help report on the state of Earth's wildlife today--to show what we have left, what we still have time to save. I ended the book with a photograph of an emperor penguin chick from the Antarctic. To me, it's an image of hope from a place that is threatened by the effects of global warming but that many nations have been working together to preserve.

I feel very lucky to be alive now, when we still have time to act, enough knowledge to act correctly, and the collective will to do so. Our role as nature photographers should always be to make sure humankind knows firsthand what's at stake and never stops trying to make a difference.