As I grew up in a bed-town community just outside of Tokyo, there was still plenty of natural environment left for wild creatures, which I cherished and enjoyed. Around the time I became a fifth-grader, however, all the developments for residential areas started, and the surrounding nature vanished in a matter of a couple of years. This experience was so devastating that I was convinced I would be very saddened if I chose to become a biologist or zoologist, which was my childhood dream.

During the time I worked in the corporate world in New York and Tokyo for more than ten years, I gradually started to feel that I would need to see places with the least human impact and that eventually took me to one of the most remote and wildest places on earth, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. There, I witnessed a bear killing a caribou calf in front of me, a pair of wolves trotting over tundra flowers, and thousands of caribou surrounding my tent. But at the same time, I learned that that wild place too was threatened by industrial activities of humans, namely oil & gas development, and more than anything, by climate change. It was a repetition of my childhood devastation. However, this time, instead of turning away, I picked up my camera. I decided to capture the beauty of pristine places left in the Arctic region and elsewhere on Earth and disseminate the images worldwide.

– Izuru Toki

July, 2017