ASMP Presents Boyd Norton February 4, 2010

Photographer Boyd Norton will give an overview of his documentation of certain areas worldwide that are facing important environmental issues. These areas include Antarctica, Borneo, Siberia, and Africa. In some of these regions he has played a role in raising public awareness and the need for action to preserve threatened wildlife and wilderness.

Boyd Norton was a young nuclear physicist in 1960, working at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho studying nuclear reactor safety (he once blew up a reactor – deliberately!). But the wild beauty of the northern Rockies developed in him a passion for saving wilderness with camera and pen. He quit the physics field in 1969, going on to earn an international reputation for environmental photography and writing.

He is author/photographer of 14 books, including Baikal: Sacred Sea of Siberia (with Peter Matthiessen); The African Elephant: Last Days of Eden; The Mountain Gorilla. Two more will be published in 2010: Serengeti: The Stillness of the Eternal Beginning and Boyd Norton’s Outdoor Digital Photography Handbook. His magazine credits include Time, National Geographic, Audubon, Smithsonian, Natural History, Outside, The New York Times, many others.

Norton has testified before numerous U.S. Senate and House hearings on behalf of wilderness and park preservation bills.

He takes special pride in having 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.

Norton has served on the Board of Trustees for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, devoted to saving the last mountain gorillas. He is a Director of Baikal Watch, dedicated to preserving Lake Baikal and other wilderness areas of Siberia.
He participated in the 9th World Wilderness Congress in Merida, Mexico in November, 2009 where he presented excerpts from his forthcoming Serengeti book and was a panelist on two panels on environmental writing.

He is a charter Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP), a Founder and Fellow of the North American Nature Photographers Association (NANPA), and a long time member of ASMP. He has lived in Evergreen, Colorado for the past 40 years.