Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Corder. It's Wednesday the 7th of January.

My guest today is Paul Goldstein, photographer, expedition guide and campaigner for protecting wildlife.

He's also a friend of the podcast and author of a book out this week called Nine Lives, One Photographer, Nine Persecuted Species.

It's a lavish book of images that Paul has captured around the world from the rainforest

and the plains of Africa to the snowy wastes of the Arctic.

But Paul has chosen the photographs to demonstrate the power and the beauty of these animals as well as their vulnerability to savage injustice on the part of humanity.

He's been telling me more.

I'm kind of done with just reading a book which

talks about photo details and pretty pictures that people flick through. Simon, you've written

books. You don't want people ever to say, oh yeah, I flick through your novel or I flip through this.

You want people to dwell on them. So it has to be provocative. It has to be substantiated. And

when you're talking, I chose

nine species that I've spent a lot of my life photographing. And only one of them is really a happy

state of affairs. I thought I had to have some degree of optimism in there. And that's the humpback whale.

Hummback whales that were butchered almost to oblivion but a number of years ago they

stopped hunting them and butchering them and now there's about a million of them so if you stop

killing things they flourish who would have thought that would work as a sort of basic tenet of

conservation but other ones Bengal tigers black and white rhino lions cheaters leopuists, polar bears, they're all threatened and humans are to blame, so I thought I need to start pinning some blame, as well as writing about the experiences I've had with them. To give you an idea, the publishers who've been superb, but they had to run on this past a couple of lawyers to check that it wouldn't end me up in court.

It still might.

But that's not the point.

And it's our lifetime, Simon, it's not our children's.

Unless we start doing very active things and getting our hands very dirty, we're going to

...