Ami Vitale

These photos were taken as part of an exhibit for the Nature Conservancy that opened in May 2009 to emphasize sustainable design and materials, and responsible conservation of our environment. The locations were Alaska, Maine, Idaho, Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Costa Rica, two locations in Bolivia, Mexico, China and Australia.

Wildlife authorities in India's northeastern state of Assam are saying the human- elephant conflict has reached alarming proportions with the pachyderms straying into towns and cities looking for food. India and its sacred elephants are threatened by deforestation and encroachment of the reserved land and natural forests. As a result, wild elephants are rampaging through villages, killing people and destroying their homes and crops. (Ami Vitale)

  The Reteti Sanctuary — the first community-owned elephant and rhino sanctuary in East Africa — provides a safe place for injured elephants and rhinos to heal and a home for orphaned elephants and rhinos affected by poaching and the ivory trade. Where possible, Reteti focuses on rescue and return, with the goal of reuniting the calves with their mothers within 48 hours. Launched in 2016, the Sanctuary has already saved one black rhino and more than two dozen elephants.

Man-Eating Lions: Stalking the Spirit Lions: Nature's most efficient predators are hunting down the people of southern Tanzania. The cats are cunning, hungry, and-some believe-not of this world.

The seeds of unrest and conflict in the Balkans can be traced back as far as history has been recorded. After years of simmering tensions, fighting erupted in Kosovo in 1998 between the majority Albanians and the Serbs. Nearly one year later, NATO launched a 78-day bombing campaign and the world watched as hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro.

I spent about a month on the road, talking to people on porches in West Virginia, at playgrounds near Detroit, and in darkened single-wides in the Nevada desert. Our concept was to show how coal damages lives in all three phases of its energy-generating cycle: when it's extracted, when it's burned, and when the leftover waste is discarded. DIG, BURN, DUMP. http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/costofcoal/

From 1975 to 2002, war was a part of daily life for the people living in the rich African country of Angola. The beaten orange paths that zigzagged across the territory represented the displacement of more than twenty-percent of the population who had to leave their villages for government-controlled towns. Much of the population was unable to feed themselves while those that lived from the rich oil resources experienced a very different life. They were two worlds living uneasily side by side.

This journey across Ethiopia traces the origination of coffee that goes back to the thirteenth century. Legend says that a herder named Kaldi noticed his goats “dancing” after nibbling bright red berries. Kaldi brought the berries to a nearby monastery where holy men declared they must be the work of the devil and threw them into a fire. Yet, the aroma was too tempting and they quickly raked the roasted beans from the embers, ground them up, and dissolved them in hot water, yielding the world’s first cup of coffee.

The Pacific islands and Micronesia in particular have to deal with the constantly rising sea levels and many fear their small atolls and islands will be washed away in the near future. These images were taken for the Nature Conservancy for an exhibit titled " Design for a Living World" on show at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York.