of traveling to some incredible places,

photographing these distant landscapes and remote cultures

all over the world.

I love my job.

But people think it's this string of epiphanies

and sunrises and rainbows,

when in reality, it looks more something like this.

(Laughter)

This is my office.

We can't afford the fanciest places to stay at night,

so we tend to sleep a lot outdoors.

As long as we can stay dry,

that's a bonus.

We also can't afford the fanciest restaurants.

So we tend to eat whatever's on the local menu.

And if you're in the Ecuadorian Páramo,

you're going to eat a large rodent called a cuy.

(Laughter)

But what makes our experiences perhaps a little bit different

and a little more unique than that of the average person

is that we have this gnawing thing in the back of our mind

that even in our darkest moments, and those times of despair,

we think, "Hey, there might be an image to be made here,

there might be a story to be told."

And why is storytelling important?

Well, it helps us to connect with our cultural and our natural heritage.

And in the Southeast,

there's an alarming disconnect between the public

and the natural areas that allow us to be here in the first place.

We're visual creatures,

so we use what we see to teach us what we know.

Now the majority of us aren't going to willingly go

way down to a swamp.

So how can we still expect those same people to then advocate

on behalf of their protection?

We can't.

So my job, then, is to use photography as a communication tool,

to help bridge the gap between the science and the aesthetics,

to get people talking,

to get them thinking,

and to hopefully, ultimately,

get them caring.

I started doing this 15 years ago right here in Gainesville,

right here in my backyard.

And I fell in love with adventure and discovery,

going to explore all these different places

that were just minutes from my front doorstep.

There are a lot of beautiful places to find.

Despite all these years that have passed,

I still see the world through the eyes of a child

and I try to incorporate that sense of wonderment

and that sense of curiosity into my photography

as often as I can.

And we're pretty lucky because here in the South,

we're still blessed with a relatively blank canvas

that we can fill with the most fanciful adventures

and incredible experiences.

It's just a matter of how far our imagination will take us.

See, a lot of people look at this and they say,

"Oh yeah, wow, that's a pretty tree."

But I don't just see a tree --

I look at this and I see opportunity.

I see an entire weekend.

Because when I was a kid, these were the types of images

that got me off the sofa and dared me to explore,

dared me to go find the woods

and put my head underwater and see what we have.

And folks, I've been photographing all over the world

and I promise you,

what we have here in the South,

what we have in the Sunshine State,

rivals anything else that I've seen.

But yet our tourism industry is busy promoting all the wrong things.

Before most kids are 12, they'll have been to Disney World

more times than they've been in a canoe

or camping under a starry sky.

And I have nothing against Disney or Mickey; I used to go there, too.

But they're missing out on those fundamental connections

that create a real sense of pride and ownership

for the place that they call home.

And this is compounded by the issue that the landscapes

that define our natural heritage

and fuel our aquifer for our drinking water

have been deemed as scary and dangerous and spooky.

When our ancestors first came here,

they warned, "Stay out of these areas, they're haunted.

They're full of evil spirits and ghosts."

I don't know where they came up with that idea.

But it's actually led to a very real disconnect,

a very real negative mentality

that has kept the public disinterested, silent,

and ultimately, our environment at risk.

We're a state that's surrounded and defined by water,

and yet for centuries,

swamps and wetlands have been regarded

as these obstacles to overcome.

And so we've treated them as these second-class ecosystems,

because they have very little monetary value

and of course, they're known to harbor alligators and snakes --

which, I'll admit, these aren't the most cuddly of ambassadors.

(Laughter)

So it became assumed, then, that the only good swamp

was a drained swamp.

And in fact,

draining a swamp to make way for agriculture and development

was considered the very essence of conservation not too long ago.

But now we're backpedaling,

because the more we come to learn about these sodden landscapes,

the more secrets we're starting to unlock

about interspecies relationships

and the connectivity of habitats, watersheds and flyways.

Take this bird, for example:

this is the prothonotary warbler.

I love this bird because it's a swamp bird,

through and through, a swamp bird.

They nest and they mate and they breed in these old-growth swamps

in these flooded forests.

And so after the spring, after they raise their young,

they then fly thousand of miles over the Gulf of Mexico

into Central and South America.

And then after the winter,

the spring rolls around and they come back.

They fly thousands of miles over the Gulf of Mexico.

And where do they go? Where do they land?

Right back in the same tree.

That's nuts.

This is a bird the size of a tennis ball --

I mean, that's crazy!

I used a GPS to get here today,

and this is my hometown.

(Laughter)

It's crazy.

So what happens, then, when this bird flies over the Gulf of Mexico

into Central America for the winter

and then the spring rolls around and it flies back,

and it comes back to this:

a freshly sodded golf course?

This is a narrative that's all too commonly unraveling

here in this state.

And this is a natural process that's occurred for thousands of years

and we're just now learning about it.

So you can imagine all else we have to learn about these landscapes

if we just preserve them first.

Now despite all this rich life that abounds in these swamps,

they still have a bad name.

Many people feel uncomfortable with the idea of wading

into Florida's blackwater.

I can understand that.

But what I loved about growing up in the Sunshine State

is that for so many of us,

we live with this latent but very palpable fear

that when we put our toes into the water,

there might be something much more ancient

and much more adapted than we are.

Knowing that you're not top dog is a welcomed discomfort, I think.

How often in this modern and urban and digital age

do you actually get the chance to feel vulnerable,

or consider that the world may not have been made for just us?

So for the last decade,

I began seeking out these areas where the concrete yields to forest

and the pines turn to cypress,

and I viewed all these mosquitoes and reptiles,

all these discomforts,

as affirmations that I'd found true wilderness,

and I embrace them wholly.

Now as a conservation photographer obsessed with blackwater,

it's only fitting that I'd eventually end up

in the most famous swamp of all:

the Everglades.

Growing up here in North Central Florida,

it always had these enchanted names,

places like Loxahatchee and Fakahatchee,

Corkscrew, Big Cypress.

I started what turned into a five-year project

to hopefully reintroduce the Everglades in a new light,

in a more inspired light.

But I knew this would be a tall order, because here you have an area

that's roughly a third the size the state of Florida, it's huge.

And when I say Everglades,

most people are like, "Oh, yeah, the national park."

But the Everglades is not just a park; it's an entire watershed,

starting with the Kissimmee chain of lakes in the north,

and then as the rains would fall in the summer,

these downpours would flow into Lake Okeechobee,

and Lake Okeechobee would fill up and it would overflow its banks

and spill southward, ever slowly, with the topography,

and get into the river of grass, the Sawgrass Prairies,

before meting into the cypress slews,

until going further south into the mangrove swamps,

and then finally -- finally -- reaching Florida Bay,

the emerald gem of the Everglades,

the great estuary,

the 850 square-mile estuary.

So sure, the national park is the southern end of this system,

but all the things that make it unique are these inputs that come in,

the fresh water that starts 100 miles north.

So no manner of these political or invisible boundaries

protect the park from polluted water or insufficient water.

And unfortunately, that's precisely what we've done.

Over the last 60 years,

we have drained, we have dammed, we have dredged the Everglades

to where now only one third of the water that used to reach the bay

now reaches the bay today.

So this story is not all sunshine and rainbows, unfortunately.

For better or for worse,

the story of the Everglades is intrinsically tied

to the peaks and the valleys of mankind's relationship

with the natural world.

But I'll show you these beautiful pictures,

because it gets you on board.

And while I have your attention, I can tell you the real story.

It's that we're taking this,

and we're trading it for this,

at an alarming rate.

And what's lost on so many people

is the sheer scale of which we're discussing.

Because the Everglades is not just responsible for the drinking water

for 7 million Floridians;

today it also provides the agricultural fields

for the year-round tomatoes and oranges

for over 300 million Americans.

And it's that same seasonal pulse of water in the summer

that built the river of grass 6,000 years ago.

Ironically, today, it's also responsible for the over half a million acres

of the endless river of sugarcane.

These are the same fields that are responsible

for dumping exceedingly high levels of fertilizers into the watershed,

forever changing the system.

But in order for you to not just understand how this system works,

but to also get personally connected to it,

I decided to break the story down into several different narratives.

And I wanted that story to start in Lake Okeechobee,

the beating heart of the Everglade system.

And to do that, I picked an ambassador,

an iconic species.

This is the Everglade snail kite.

It's a great bird,

and they used to nest in the thousands,

thousands in the northern Everglades.

And then they've gone down to about 400 nesting pairs today.

And why is that?

Well, it's because they eat one source of food, an apple snail,

about the size of a ping-pong ball, an aquatic gastropod.

So as we started damming up the Everglades,

as we started diking Lake Okeechobee and draining the wetlands,

we lost the habitat for the snail.

And thus, the population of the kites declined.

And so, I wanted a photo that would not only communicate this relationship

between wetland, snail and bird,

but I also wanted a photo that would communicate

how incredible this relationship was,

and how very important it is that they've come to depend on each other,

this healthy wetland and this bird.

And to do that, I brainstormed this idea.