Proof: Steve Winter on Saving the World’s Predators | National Geographic

I have this vivid memory of lying on our
living room floor
Nike kid with your feet in the air legs
crossed leaping through national
Geographics
and going to these exotic lands with
exotic cultures and my heart was gone
when I was 8 years old
I want to be a national and geographic
photographer so I’m very very lucky to
be able to have realized my dream it was
so funny on my first story I was you
know one-room shack on top of a mountain
Guatemala when I heard the stairs
creaking at night and then I hear this
scratching under the door and then and
the hair on back my head stood I grabbed
the radio and called down the mountain
to juan carlos and they said in spanish
steve no problem it’s just a black
Jaguar that was my beginning of big cats
the one thing I learned about big cats
is that it’s like an umbrella you’ve
protected top predator you protect
everything underneath it
including the landscape the ecosystem
and everything down to the little
insects and you see this when you go to
empty for sore dead for us you take out
certain parts something Bad’s gonna
happen because these are all important
to each other we’re doing this to show
millions of people a story that we were
so interested in because the stories
come from here pictures that you don’t
want to look at sometimes have more
power
I mean beauty is one thing heartbreak is
another pictures that you just can’t
stand looking at are the ones that maybe
have the most power