- For 20 years my camera's led me
to some pretty extraordinary places.
I could have never imagined that I would be standing
on the streets of a place like Pyongyang, North Korea
and 20 years later I came back to the United States
with my cameras and it's been every bit as mind blowing.
(applause)
NatGeo spent a year covering Yellowstone.
They had a single topic issue this summer.
There were many decorated National Geographic photographers
out there but the rest of them were inside the park
showing the landscapes, the wild life,
the biology,
the tourists, the glory of our public land.
My job was to stand outside the boundaries
of Yellowstone National Park because NatGeo knew
it was just as important to tell the story
of the people who live on the other side of the line
and what it means to live adjacent to a national park.
On my first day I drove through Yellowstone National Park
this is what I saw.
Welcome back to America, ground zero.
So I lived my life outside of the boundaries
of the park.
Little towns like Livingston, I photographed them
in the same way that I photographed my life
in North Korea and anywhere else.
In the bars where I ate dinner, on main streets.
I started my own new Instagram series,
I called this one Work Commute.
Work Commute wasn't only to make all of the editors
jealous that they were sitting in an office all day
and this is where I was working.
It was also that idea that we could take people
out into the field.
That a National Geographic story lasts for an entire year
so why not bring people along with you.
I had another series #dogsinpickuptrucks.
(laughter)
but what National Geographic really wanted me to do
in Yellowstone was tackle issues
and mainly they wanted me to look at the conflict
and confluence between people and wildlife.
The first thing that I covered were bison.
Bison have had a very dark history in our country.
We once had 50 maybe 60 million of them
roaming North America.
We killed them down to just a handful
but it was also the moment
when human beings looked after animals
and the conservation movement was born
and they brought them back from extinction
and now the core DNA...
American Bison that we have today
live inside Pelican Valley in Yellowstone National Park
but they only have room for four, maybe 5000 of them
and every year they come out and cross the line
and wander into our yards and into our highways.
The bison was named our national mammal this year
and yet in the west in many places
it's still registered as livestock.
Can you imagine the bald eagle as livestock,
kept in a chicken coop?
They're not that loved actually by a lot of people
in the west because of...
The proximity that they live to the parks.
Who couldn't love this guy?
He was being- this is a Yellowstone bison,
he was being tagged and tested
for a disease called Brucellosis.
Many people don't love bison
because they fear this disease
and that they will transfer this disease to their cattle
once they cross outside of Yellowstone
and this bison tested positive and this is how they dealt
with it.
Very quickly, execution style.
So they're looking for solutions,
how to manage bison, how to deal with them
how to protect them
but also live with them.
And one of the solutions is Native American hunting rights
as the bison cross over into our land
outside of public land,
they give a certain number of hunting licenses
to the native peoples.
I had the privilege of going with these men
and watching them as they hunted this bison
and ceremoniously removing its heart in a field
and they've started a new program too
where they instead of killing them they round them up
put them in these trucks and ship them off
to the Native America Reservations
because native peoples have a direct connection
to the bison.
When this truck arrived in Fort Belknap in the north
of Montana they let out school,
all the kids came, all the elders came
and people celebrated as they let them go
and let them lose on their land again.
I photographed elk.
It's probably the animal that's maybe the pulse
of Yellowstone.
It's what the bears and the wolves eat.
It's also what brings in millions of tourists every year.
These beautiful animals that you can see them
practically no other place.
But again outside of the line
people see them a very different way.
There's almost a cult of hunting
and it's big business too.
So I tried to go right on the line
that separates the park from the rest of the state.
This line right behind the hunter,
that's the actual boundary of Yellowstone National Park
and the hunters come here, put themselves right on the line
and wait for elk to come up over the hill.
The elk know where that line is, it's amazing.
When they cross it's like they just saunter in
home free but when they don't like this one on the right,
the hunter shot him, he stood up, he struggled,
trying to get to the line and he shot him again,
he slid right to the line and the hunter said,
"It's a good thing he didn't make it to the other side
"cause we wouldn't have been able to retrieve him legally."
This is not a hunter, this is a biologist darting a wolf
for research purposes.
Wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone
in the mid-1990s because
they didn't believe
that the ecosystem could be healthy
without an alpha predator like the wolf
and they're loved inside the park.
Tourists name them, they watch them with remote cameras
from laptops in their homes,
they have tattoos on their arms of wolves
and when they see them through a spotting scope
they break down in tears.
It's quite amazing but again outside of the park
it's a different story.
Ranchers fear them because they come onto their property,
they eat their livestock
and actually they just see them in many ways as demons,
the big bad wolf.
And these are not people who are used to doing things
any other way than settling them in their own way.
They told me, "we're used to living with wolves now
and we know that they're here to stay
but we don't like the federal government telling us
what to do."
But they're learning to live with wolves and bears
and they're learning to ranch
and to live their lives differently.
They used to just send these sheep up
into national forest land and let them graze
for the season all alone
but now they go with them, they sleep every night out there
with the sheep and I did this too.
I followed them all the way to the top
of the Gravelly Mountains.
The animal that's on most peoples minds right now
are grizzly bears.
Grizzlies have been protected as an endangered species
for something like 40 years
and maybe as a sign of their recovery
the numbers are greater, they're coming further down
into lower lands, they're becoming a bit more habituated.
Now we find them in the front lawns eating apples
out of our apple trees.
This is Dusty, he's a bear trapper
for the state of Montana.
He's sort of like a dog catcher
or like a beat cop.
He goes around, he educates people
how to protect their garbage
and how to protect bears by not allowing them
to become habituated
but he also gets his 911 calls,
"Hey there's a bear on my roof again."
and they go and they dart them and they bring them back
to the garage and they sometimes
euthanize them if the bear becomes too difficult
to deal with
but usually like this bear, they tag their ear,
they brush their teeth, they give them inoculations
and then they drive them from Wyoming to the Montana border
and they let them go on the other side.
And the bear catchers in Montana told me the same thing.
They bring them into Wyoming, open the door,
let em go into Wyoming.
This man's name is Nick Patrick.
He knows better than anyone what it means
to live on that line, to live with the wild,
to live with bears.
He's a rancher from Wyoming.
One day he was walking in his yard with his dogs,
his dogs start barking and they ran off
into the willow trees.
He thought maybe they were chasing a raccoon
so he walked in behind them,
he didn't have his bear spray
and he found himself suddenly caught
between a huge sow grizzly bear and her two cubs.
Before he could do anything, the grizzly was on him.
He said with one swipe it took off his entire face.
He fell to the ground, it mauled him, he played dead,
she let him go.
As she was walking away he reached into his pocket
to see if he had something
to protect himself, she turned and saw him.
She was on him again, she mauled him,
dragged him by his leg.
She let him live.
He walked back from the willow trees into his barn
and he found a shop rag and he covered his face
so that he could go and tell his wife
and his children that he'd been injured.
He didn't want them to see what had happened to him.
And he walked in the house and told them to,
"Take me to the hospital."
When we first started this project
we wanted to photograph Nick because Nick tells that story
of living with wild better than anyone else
but he said he didn't want to be photographed then
because he hadn't had the reconstructive surgery
that you see in this picture.
He hadn't been given this new prosthetic silicone nose
and he said, "I don't want to be photographed like this yet"
and it wasn't because Nick is vain,
it's because Nick said, "I don't want my face
to tell the wrong story and scare people away."
because Nick believes that we have to live with the wild
and Nick says that, "That mother was doing what any mother
"would do, protect her children."
and Nick said, "I want my face to tell a different story,
"I want it to tell a story
"of how we should protect the land
"and we should protect the wild life
"and that we have to learn to live among them."
So National Geographic spent this entire year 2016
photographing national parks.
This was the centennial of the creation of the park service.
Every issue had a story about a national park
and I tried to go to as many as I could too
now that I was back in America.
I took my children, we went to the Badlands,
we went to the Everglades and I hung around
with these invasive python hunters
and I went to Yosemite.
I got to go with President Obama to Yosemite National Park.
He was there on fathers' day to tour the park
with his family but also to announce even more land
and seas that he and our government decided to protect.
With that announcement he solidified his legacy
as the best president that we've ever had
for conservation, protecting more land and seas
than any other before him.
I got the chance to walk through the forest with him.
Just me and a couple of cameramen
and at the end he shook our hands
and I thanked him and he said,
"Hey, aren't you the guy who took all those pictures
in North Korea?"
(laughter)
I said "Yes," and I said "What did you think?"
and he said, "It's good, I think it was important
"we got to see something we don't normally see."
and he started to walk away and he turned around
and he said, "Hey, just be careful over there,
"I don't want to have to come over there
"and rescue you and bring you back home."
(laughter)
but I made it home, exactly 20 years
from the time that I left.
It was actually 4th of July the first day
that I came back.
I went to my sister's house, she had a 4th of July party.
Now that I'm home, I guess I kind of often
feel like a stranger in a strange land
after being away for so long
and so I notice and I photograph the things
that maybe outsiders would notice.
All the patriotism and the flags
and the sugary diet that we have
and maybe I'm a little critical
but I also know that my sister made these
and so I also feel love
and I also feel like I'm happy to be home again.
This is my front yard where I moved back to.
This is the frozen lake outside of the house I'm living in.
Those are my footsteps going out onto the lake
and back to my yard.
I had to go quite far out into the world
for a long time
to feel like I could answer
that voice in my head and that I could find my purpose
and that I could bring that purpose back intact
and that I could notice all the little bits of beauty
right here in my own country and in my own back yard.
And so maybe for most of you, you didn't have
to quite go so far.
You knew that from the beginning
but for me I had to go a long way
before I could come back home.
So I want to end by just thanking National Geographic
because they brought me back home
and they're still sending me out there
into the wild so thank you very much.
(applause)