Boyd Norton
Boyd Norton has been selected as the 2015 recipient of the Sierra Club’s prestigious Ansel Adams Award. This award honors an individual who has made superlative use of still photography to further conservation causes over a lifetime.
Norton is the photographer and author of 17 books, ranging in topics from African elephants to mountain gorillas, and from Siberia’s Lake Baikal to the Serengeti ecosystem.
His most recent book, Serengeti: The Eternal Beginning, won high praise from Jane Goodall and NBC News correspondent Richard Engel, among many others. The book was a finalist in the 2012 annual Colorado Book Awards.
His newest book, Conservation Photography Handbook: How to Save the World One Photograph at a Time is due for publication in early 2016. He is at work on three more books.
Norton’s photographs and articles have appeared in most major magazines, including Time, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Natural History, Outside, The New York Times, Audubon, and many others in North America and Europe.
Throughout his 50 years of photography, writing and environmental activism, he has played a key role in the establishment of several wilderness areas in the Rocky Mountain region, new national parks in Alaska, and in the designation of Siberia’s Lake Baikal as a World Heritage Site. He has testified before numerous U.S. Senate and House hearings on wilderness and national park legislation. In 1991 he met with Russia’s Foreign Minister in the Kremlin to lobby for the protection of Lake Baikal. Baikal was awarded World Heritage Site status in 1996.
He is currently leading the battle to save the Serengeti ecosystem from proposed damaging developments. He has been documenting Serengeti for over 30 years, leading photo safaris and on book and magazine assignments.
He received an award in 1980 from the Environmental Protection Agency, presented by Robert Redford, for his "important, exciting environmental photography and writing."
He is a Charter Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers, and a founder and Fellow of the International League of Conservation Writers.
He has served on the Board of Trustees of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
In 2010 he was named “One of the 40 most influential nature photographers from around the globe” by Outdoor Photography Magazine in Great Britain.
Norton has lived in Colorado for 47 years. Prior to that he resided in Idaho where he was a nuclear physicist studying nuclear reactor safety for the Atomic Energy Commission. He once blew up a nuclear reactor – deliberately – the subject of one of his new books underway.
“There is language going on out there- the language of the wild. Roars, snorts, trumpets, squeals, whoops, and chirps all have meaning derived over eons of expression... We have yet to become fluent in the language -and music- of the wild.”
“A charging black rhinoceros is nothing to mess with. When it is headed straight toward you, it is the ultimate exercise in sphincter control. In my case, it was a strange bit of weather that caused one to charge me.”
“Wilderness gave us knowledge. Wilderness made us human. We came from here. Perhaps that is why so many of us feel a strong bond to this land called Serengeti; it is the land of our youth.”