Ami Vitale on Photojournalism and Wildlife Conservation
Conversations with Tyler
Conversations with Tyler
4.8 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 February 2024
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ami Vitale is a renowned National Geographic photographer and documentarian with a deep commitment to wildlife conservation and environmental education. Her work, spanning over a hundred countries, includes spending a decade as a conflict photographer in places like Kosovo, Gaza, and Kashmir.
She joined Tyler to discuss why we should stay scary to pandas, whether we should bring back extinct species, the success of Kenyan wildlife management, the mental cost of a decade photographing war, what she thinks of the transition from film to digital, the ethical issues raised by Afghan Girl, the future of National Geographic, the heuristic guiding of where she'll travel next, what she looks for in a young photographer, her next project, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded November 1st, 2023.
Other ways to connect
- Follow us on X and Instagram
- Follow Tyler on X
- Sign up for our newsletter
- Join our Discord
- Email us: [email protected]
- Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercadus Center at George Mason University, |
| 0:09.3 | bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. |
| 0:13.0 | Learn more at Mercadis.org. |
| 0:16.0 | For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, |
| 0:20.0 | visit Conversations with Tyler.com. |
| 0:26.0 | Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. |
| 0:30.0 | Today I'm chatting with Amy Vitale. |
| 0:32.0 | She is a National geographic photographer, writer, |
| 0:35.0 | speaker, and documentary filmmaker. |
| 0:37.8 | She's been a wartime conflict photographer for about 10 years. |
| 0:41.9 | She is an important figure in the animal conservation movement |
| 0:45.0 | and she's traveled to more than 100 countries. She's author of the 2018 best-selling book, |
| 0:50.0 | Pandelove, and she is founder and director of a new nonprofit for arts |
| 0:55.1 | education around the world called Vital Impacts. You can see her work on her |
| 1:00.5 | home page. If you Google her that's Amy Am I Amy Vitali and also on |
| 1:06.0 | Instagram Amy welcome. Thank you Tyler it's wonderful to be with you today |
| 1:11.0 | why is it that human panda keepers dress up as pandas? |
| 1:16.0 | Well, the thinking was that |
| 1:20.0 | pandas should never be comfortable around humans because humans are one of the biggest threats to most wild animals and in this case these were captive born pandas who were being trained to go back to the wild because |
| 1:36.7 | after one generation in captivity they do not know how to survive in the wild and |
| 1:40.9 | so the lucky pandas that were chosen to be a part of this program, they didn't want them |
| 1:47.8 | interacting with humans and the main point about it is that these costumes, it was more, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Conversations with Tyler, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Conversations with Tyler and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.