National Geographic photojournalist Charlie Hamilton James will present “I Bought a Rainforest,” a free lecture about his experiences in Peru’s Manu National Park, as well as his adventures in Yellowstone National Park, as part of MPAC’s annual Earth Day lecture series. The lecture will be held Wednesday, April 19 at 7:30 pm.
The MPAC Earth Day lecture is made possible by generous support from BASF, which has sponsored the Earth Day lecture series since its inception five years ago. James will also present a free lecture to students and schools earlier that day at MPAC.
The title of his talk will be “I Bought a Rainforest.” For more than two decades, Charlie Hamilton James has photographed and spent time living inside Peru’s Manu National Park—a UNESCO World Heritage site considered to be the world’s richest biodiversity hotspot, and Yellowstone, the world’s first national park and the home of Old Faithful. In an effort to protect the rain forest in Peru, Hamilton James recently purchased 100 acres adjoining Manu—only to discover that he had purchased an illegal coca plantation along with it. In this show, Charlie shares with us these two treasures, along with his misadventures.
Charlie Hamilton James is a photojournalist who specializes in wildlife and conservation. His work requires specialized equipment, much of which he makes. Hamilton James has a particular interest in exposing “the brilliance of nature” in order to better document, understand, and save it. He has been obsessed with kingfishers—brightly plumed ambush hunters—since he was six, and with otters since he was ten. He has since become an authority on both, photographing kingfishers for National Geographic in 2009 and river otters in 2013.
Fiercely motivated to protect the rain forest habitat of Peru’s Manú National Park, a place where he has worked for the past 20 years, Hamilton James purchased a 100-acre plot of land adjoining the park, only to learn he had acquired an illegal coca plantation along with it. His misadventures are featured in both the June 2016 issue of National Geographic and a three-part series by the BBC entitled I Bought a Rainforest. In the series, Hamilton James went on a journey to discover the real Amazon—living with illegal loggers, working in a gold mine, taking mind-altering drugs with shaman, hunting the Machiguenga indians, and photographing uncontacted tribes. The result was dramatic and powerful—described by The Guardian as, “Survivor meets The Mosquito Coast meets Apocalypse Now meets Breaking Bad.” He has since returned to Manu National Park to cover its wildlife and people for National Geographic.
When not in the field photographing, Hamilton James shoots natural history films for clients including the BBC, and others, through his production company Halcyon Media LTD, which he runs with his wife Philippa Forrester. He also does on-air work as a TV presenter for various BBC programs, including Halcyon River Diaries, which documented the year he and his family spent living on the river outside their house. Hamilton James has been nominated for Emmy awards and twice won the Royal Television Society award for photography.
Recently, Hamilton James has taken up residence in Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, founded in 1872. Yellowstone is home to a wide variety of fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and 67 species of mammals, including some of our most embattled predators. For the May National Geographic story celebrating the National Park Service centennial in 2016, Hamilton James went beyond the park’s boundaries from Wyoming into Idaho and Montana, to create a portrait of the one of the largest temperate-zone ecosystems on Earth.
