Abraão António “Tony” Lujoque stands beside the remains of a Soviet-era tank in Angola’s Lisima highlands — a landscape where the scars of war still sit quietly beneath the forest canopy.
Tony joined the rebel forces at a young age and spent much of Angola’s civil war moving through these forests. Long before conservation teams arrived here, survival depended on understanding the landscape intimately — where water could be found, how to move unseen through the forest, how to read danger in silence, broken vegetation or distant animal movement.
Today, that same knowledge helps guide efforts to understand and protect this ecosystem.
“The forest speaks,” Tony explained me one evening beside the fire. “If you do not know how to listen, you will not be able to see these elephants and it might seem the forest is empty.”
People like Tony have carried knowledge of this place through war, isolation and generations of living with the land itself.
And standing beside the remains of conflict slowly disappearing back into the forest, I found myself wondering how many landscapes survive not because they were untouched by people, but because there were still people left who knew how to listen to them.
Jorge Ngunga and Rosi Kasuekadry dry fish along the Kwando River in southeastern Angola’s Lisima highlands.
In many parts of the world, rivers are increasingly treated as resources to maximize — controlled, extracted from and pushed to produce more. But spending time with families living along the Kwando, I was struck by a very different relationship with the river. Life here moves with its rhythms.
Fishing is not simply about catching as much as possible. It depends on understanding currents, flood cycles, seasons and the behavior of the water itself. Traditional moziva traps are woven from local reeds and shaped by the flow of the river, allowing smaller fish to pass while limiting what is taken from the system.
From the outside, it can be easy to project our own ideas of limitation onto places like these — to assume that people living close to the land must automatically aspire to something larger, faster or more extractive. But many of the families I met seemed far more concerned with continuity: having enough to eat, enough to share and maintaining a relationship with the river that could endure across generations.
Watching life along the Kwando, I found myself wondering whether one of the greatest differences between our own society and places like this is not simply about population density and how much we consume, but how differently we define the ideas of enough and success.
Photo @jasperdoest #onassignment @natgeo in #angola
Kutiti fisherman and tracker Elias Kalueyo examines a fresh elephant track in the Lisima highlands of southeastern Angola.
In many conservation stories, tracking is often presented as a way of finding animals. But spending time with people like Elias made me realize it is also a way of reading relationship.
The ground here holds memory. A broken branch, disturbed sand, the direction of water, the age of a footprint — each detail becomes part of a larger understanding of how animals move through the landscape and how people move with them.
This knowledge was not learned from maps, satellite imagery or scientific papers. It was passed between generations through lived experience, observation and stories tied to the land itself.
When we speak about conservation, we often focus on protecting species, landscapes or ecosystems, while far less attention is given to protecting the cultural knowledge systems that once taught people how to live alongside them.
Therefore, the continued presence of elephants in the Lisima landscape reflects more than the survival of these animals. It reflects the survival of relationship.
Photo @jasperdoest #onassignment @natgeo in #angola
Morning light breaks over the Kwando River in Angola’s Lisima highlands, where forest, grassland and peat-rich wetlands stretch across a landscape that feeds some of southern Africa’s great watersheds.
From above, the rivers almost seem to emerge out of mist and sand. Every shallow valley here becomes the beginning of water moving slowly outward across the continent.
But the deeper story here is not only about rivers, elephants or wilderness.
It is about relationship.
Spending time in Lisima challenged many of my own assumptions about what conservation is supposed to look like. Here, people, animals, rivers and forests are not understood as separate things, but as part of a larger living system shaped by memory, belief and ways of living passed from generation to generation.
The stories connected to this landscape — about spirits, fire, ancestors and water — are not simply myths detached from reality. They influence how people move through the land, what they protect, what they fear, what they respect and how they understand their place within the ecosystem itself.
And perhaps that is part of why this landscape has remained so intact for so long. Because relationships with the land were never entirely broken.
The presence of elephants here reflects more than the survival of a species. It reflects the health of a much larger system — one in which culture and ecology continue to shape one another.
Photo @jasperdoest #onassignment @natgeo in #angola
Morning fog drifts across a source lake in the Lisima highlands of southeastern Angola as Kerllen Costa crosses the water by canoe.
At first glance, this landscape can feel almost impossible to understand — endless pale sand covered in forest, where every valley becomes the beginning of a river. Hidden within these highlands are around twenty source lakes and wetlands feeding river systems that flow across southern Africa toward the Okavango, Zambezi and Congo basins.
Local tradition speaks of Mukisi, a dragon-like spirit believed to inhabit these waters. Stories surrounding Mukisi shaped how communities related to these lakes for generations — encouraging restraint, respect and careful use of places understood to give life far beyond themselves.
Because of this, these lakes remained largely undisturbed. Villages were not built along their shores. Fishing and other activities were approached with caution in places considered spiritually significant.
And whether understood through belief, tradition or ecology, the result is tangible: many of these source lakes and wetlands remain remarkably intact, sustaining landscapes, wildlife and millions of people far beyond this place.
The more time I spent in Lisima, the more I realized that science alone cannot fully explain humanity’s relationship with a landscape like this. Many of the clues also live in stories, memory, myth and the ways people pass knowledge from one generation to the next. Not simply as folklore, but as forces that shape behavior and relationships with the living world.
Looking at my own country and culture, I fear what happens when those relationships begin to disappear…
Photos & video by @jasperdoest #onassignment @natgeo
In the Lisima highlands of southeastern Angola, fire moves through grasslands and peat-rich wetlands each dry season. For the Luchazi — sometimes referred to as the“fire people” — fire is part of a relationship between people, season, soil and renewal that has evolved with the landscape over generations. Burning here is guided by intricate ecological knowledge: when to burn, where to burn, how different vegetation responds, how fire moves through grassland, forest and peat-rich wetlands.
Spending time in Lisima, I learned that fire here is not seen as a single thing. Different parts of the flame, ash and charcoal each have their own names, reflecting how deeply fire is woven into cultural memory and daily life.
Today, the role of controlled burning remains widely debated within conservation and land management. But what becomes difficult to ignore in these highlands is that the ecosystem still functions largely because these intricate relationships between people and land continue to exist. Not simply through rules or enforcement, but through stories, beliefs, traditions and ways of living that have been passed from generation to generation.
It made me wonder how many of our environmental crises are not only ecological, but also cultural. Because perhaps one of the greatest conservation questions of our time is not only how to protect our living landscapes, but how to protect the cultural memory that teaches people how to live with them.
Last year, I joined the mountain gorilla census in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda @bwindinationalpark #onassignment @wwf_uk@wwf .
For days, we followed gorilla families through dense rainforest — moving through mud, mist, tangled vegetation, and steep valleys alongside trackers, rangers, @igcp_21 scientists, and local communities who dedicate their lives to protecting this fragile population.
A generation ago, mountain gorillas stood on the brink of extinction. Today, their numbers seem to be slowly increasing again. Fragile proof that coexistence, however imperfect and complicated, is still possible.
While we still have to wait for the latest census results, a selection of images were published by The Guardian yesterday. More from this story later this year.
In the highlands of southeastern Angola, people have lived with these elephants for generations. They don’t see them as animals to be studied, but as ancestors—part of a system in which landscape, leadership, and life are inseparable.
When I arrived there last year, I wasn’t stepping into a place waiting to be discovered. I was stepping into a landscape that had always been known… just not always visible to outsiders.
Working alongside @_kerllencosta and his team, as part of the broader efforts initiated by @drsteveboyes , we placed camera traps deep in the Miombo woodlands. Weeks later, this image appeared. A single moment, confirming that they are still there.
But this story isn’t really about finding elephants. It’s about a landscape where their presence—or absence—reflects the balance between people and land. A place where traditional ways of living have protected an ecosystem for generations, even through war and isolation.
These forests form the source of rivers that sustain life far beyond this place. But they are also a source of identity for the communities who live here.
And while this might be the first high-resolution photograph of these elusive elephants, they are not a discovery. They are a sign of continuity.
And perhaps a reminder that conservation is not always something we create—but that it can simply be part of the ways of living, something we can learn from.
I wouldn’t have been able to do this without the people who helped me along the way—not just through the forest, but in understanding what this place means. Grateful for the trust, the patience, and the human connections that made this possible 💚💫
I’ll share more about this story in the coming weeks.
Photo @jasperdoest #onassignment @natgeo together with @graysonschaffer . Thank you @alexa_keefe , @afarrar , @heartattackack and @nathanlump for the trust and time to tell this story 🙏
I remember my editor and I talking about doing studio portraits of Blair’s dogs.
Clem was the first to try…the one that taught me that that wasn’t going to work.
It’s not that he resisted, or misbehaved…he simply ignored my premise 😂
Every time I tried to isolate him and create a clean image, he would walk straight to Blair. As if the idea of him existing by himself, didn’t make sense to him.
Over the years Blair and her dog have built such a strong relationship that I kinda knew relation—the minute I saw the two—that my anticipated portrait was never going to happen.
Or maybe it did. Just not in the way I expected.
Because in the end, the only way Clem could be seen was in the space where he chose to belong…together with Blair.
#shoutout to Jasper @tastylighting for helping me out when KLM lost one of my bags on this shoot!
Dora was never easy to photograph.
We’re used to dogs that follow commands, that sit, stay, perform.
Sled dogs are different. They’re not raised in that way. They think, decide, negotiate and just want to run…
It makes them incredible to work with,
but not easy when you’re trying to make what we would call a portrait 😂
While working on this story for The New York Times Magazine, I kept having the feeling that every frame was just a fraction too late.
In the article Blair writes about Dora’s energy, her urgency, her need to move…and that’s exactly what it felt like behind the camera.
It wasn’t until the last day that I realized that I shouldn’t try to freeze her. I just needed to move with her.
I used to wonder what the role of beautiful images is in a world that feels increasingly at odds with itself 😅
But spending all this time studying Flamingo Bob up close made me see it a bit differently.
Maybe it’s less about beauty, and more about what makes you stop for a second…and just look a little longer. Because taking the time is where feeling starts. And once you feel it, that’s where caring begins.
Flamboyance No. 6 is available as a limited edition fine art print, part of The Nature of Hope,
a print collection supporting the next generation of storytellers and conservationists.
Check out the entire collection: link in bio.
The Nature of Hope—a global print collection created by @vital.impacts with the Jane Goodall Institute—brings together images shaped by care, connection, and the belief that change is still possible.
I’m grateful that “Poise” is part of this collection and available as a limited edition.
Bob is a Caribbean flamingo from Curaçao.
After flying into a hotel window, he could no longer return to the wild. Under the care of Odette Doest, he found a different role and became a spokesbird for environmental awareness in the Caribbean and well beyond.
I made this image when Bob and Odette visited Landhuis Jan Thiel, a former plantation house on the island.
Standing there, watching him move across those tiles, I realized that a place once defined by control, was now holding a moment of care.
Sometimes hope isn’t loud. It doesn’t need to be. Often it’s the softer moments that linger.
Check out the entire collection: link in bio
#natureofhope #earthmonth
