From February 2007 through July 2007 I worked with CNN’s Planet in Peril crew running around the globe to survey the state of Earth’s health. We experienced just about every possible climate, every weather condition. I enjoyed the pleasure of a parasite’s company for close to three months after our shoot in Brazil. One of the cameramen was bitten by a spider and had to have his knee lanced to relieve the swelling. Working with Anderson Cooper, Jeff Corwin and Sanjay Gupta we flew, drove, boated, and walked thousands of miles on almost every continent. We slept on more than our fair share of concrete floors. And no, hammocks are not conducive to a good nights sleep. Occasionally our meals of Pringles and Powerbars were punctuated by buffets. Exhaustion and elation create an interesting combination. By the end we were tanked. But we knew it was worth it. Here are some pictures from the journey:

Phnom Penh, Cambodia – March 2007
Releasing birds

Cambodia is a fascinating place. The specter of the Khmer Rouge regime hangs over the country. It’s a predominantly young population. Exceedingly poor. On the streets vendors release a handful of birds for a handful of coins. People walk up, make a prayer and the birds fly free. Environmental activists are doing their best to stop illegal poaching and wildlife trading, but they have their work cut out for them.

Kaktovik, Alaska, USA – April 2007
Polar Bear

He’s not dead. Just sleeping. Sawing logs in the article circle— white on white. We were working with scientists from United States Geological Survey (USGS) doing aerial and on the ground studies of the polar bear population outside of Kaktovik, Alaska, USA. Had to be one of the most remote “towns” I’ve ever seen— at least in the States. Seriously out in the middle of nowhere— cold as all get out— harsh place. But you wouldn’t suspect it from the sleeping bear— conked out on a tranquilizer cocktail— dreaming of a seal buffet. I wanted to shoot something graphic, something clean— and believe me— that far north in Alaska, there are few things to clutter a frame. The white is endless. In 360 degrees it’s endless. Polar bears are not currently on the endangered species list, but there’s a growing movement to put them on preemptively. Protection rather than reaction. That’s the issue we were looking at, and that’s why this one is sleeping. Kicking out a few ZZZZZ’s so USGS can safely gather the data it needs to measure the health of the population. He’ll wake up about an hour later. But by that time we’re on our way— helicopter blades warming up, in search of another bear.

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA – July 2007
Tree and sky

A tree trunk leans over the mid-morning sky’s reflection in a small lake. I’m drawn towards abstractions— and the contrast of the jagged branches against gossamer clouds.

Lake Chad, Chad – June 2007
Donkeys

Ribs. The ribs were the first thing that jumped out at me when we stopped the convoy of Land Cruisers at this watering hole. If the health of livestock is any indication the overall health of the people who tend to them, then I knew this was a bad sign. I don’t think anyone has ever described a donkey as a charismatic animal, but these animals were so emaciated they stumbled about purely on the strength of their skeletal systems. All muscle and fat long ago left their bodies.

Lake Chad, Chad – June 2007
Fabric in front of well

With heat easily cresting 115 degrees Fahrenheit, water is an absolute necessity in central Africa. And with Lake Chad seemingly shrinking, an already scare resource is becoming all the more vital. There is water in Africa, but so much of it is dirty, polluted by chemicals or livestock, or other people. Filling up their jerry cans women from a local village gathered around a single spigot, their water lifeline.

Lake Chad, Chad – June 2007
Fish

This one really is dead. A fish washed up on the banks of Lake Chad. We’ve heard the lake is shrinking, fish populations dwindling, and overall size of the remaining fish diminishing. This guy was about the size of my palm. Dead for who knows how long. The water startled the flies every time the waves lapped at the fish’s decaying body. While there are many dead fish in many lakes in many parts of the world, I felt like this one hinted at the relative health of Lake Chad, and the direction it’s heading.

Bangkok, Thailand – March 2007
Woman in boat

The floating market outside of Bangkok, early morning, weird light, weird shadows. There are bridges that pass over the water as vendors paddle up and down hawking produce. It’s pretty touristy. That’s probably the main reason it still exists. But I showed up early and wanted to look for colorful photos as a backdrop to Thai culture. The mangoes looked fantastic— they’re great in Asia. I like the odd, dark shapes angled down the middle of the frame. It’s shadows dancing on the rippling water. It’s motion frozen at 1/125 of a second; the pause button hit on a liquid tango.

Kraho Village, Brazil – February 2007
Kraho boy

The thupp-thupp sound of the helicopter brought the whole village out from their mud huts as we landed in a grass field in the Kraho village on the outskirts of the Amazon. We spent two days there, overnight in sleeping bags on a concrete floor under a straw roof. When it wasn’t drizzling, it was full on raining. We had a bit of sun, but even when it disappeared it was still warm. Most of the Kraho, men and women, wore little more than shorts. And they gathered around us as we gathered footage. After we had been in the village for a couple hours, the village chief decided we all needed to be inducted into the tribe. That meant receiving tribal names and markings on our arms with a blue dye. For some reason, not one of us in the whole crew thought to ask how long it would take for the dye to wash off. And so began the next two weeks of weird looks after we left the Kraho village and went back into the Brazilian cities— I’m sure we were mistaken for a motley band of rabid sports fans or something, blue rings and lines up and down our arms. As the Kraho gave us the tribal markings, they also gave us tribal names. Mine was “dead fish”, which I thought was a joke until our translator admonished me not to laugh. Hmm. I’m still hoping that’s not a reflection of my personality. At least I avoided the “White Pig” moniker applied to another member of the crew. Bullet dodged…sort of.

I’ve probably been to the Ground Zero site 60 or so times since 9/11/01 and visiting each new time is like watching an old photograph age and fade away. Of course I’ll never forget those first horrific days, but returning to the site now leaves very little context of what went on that Tuesday morning. There is still a giant hole in the ground but it is now just a construction site.

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Greenwich Street, which I sprinted down trying to outrun the tornado of dust and debris as the South Tower fell, now is just like any other Manhattan avenue, with shops, taxis, parking garages and Wall Street types hustling past on the sidewalk. I shot a ceremony outside a firehouse this morning where the firefighters observed moments of silence at the times the planes struck the towers.

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The paradox of the cleanup and recovery is that there are very few symbols remaining of what happened that day. I spent last week down at the site shooting for a multimedia piece on what Ground Zero looks and feels like now. I recall as a kid being taken to a Civil War battlefield by my father one day and complaining to him that there was nothing to see. I’m pretty sure most visitors to Ground Zero now feel like I did that day at Antietam.

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BAGHDAD, IRAQ: A street in the Green Zone is seen through a U.S. military Humvee window March 8, 2007 in Baghdad, Iraq.

I won’t be running in the Green Zone anymore, though it made perfect sense last week. I was stuck there (I had planned to be there for one day working for Newsweek) after the shrine in Samarra had been bombed and a 24-hour lock down had been enforced on Baghdad.

Without much else to do, I jogged every morning around the Green Zone, down its wide boulevards lined with trash, concrete blast walls and empty fields. Newsweek employs a South African security man, I asked him if running there was safe and he gave his reluctant approval.

“Just watch for mortars,” he said with a sigh. I nodded, we both knew that wasn’t possible.

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BAGHDAD, IRAQ: The Iraqi flag flies over an Iraqi government building in the Green Zone, on June 28, 2004 in Baghdad, Iraq.

The runs were tense. I’d stretch at the front gate at the Newsweek house, then head out onto the main streets. The Green Zone was the neighborhood that held Saddam’s palaces and housed his cornies; so the streets are broad, as wide as an interstate freeway, and yet are lined by only the occasional opulent house or tacky monument. There are no real sidewalks, so I ran on the side of the road, passed by dusty American Humvee convoys or pickup trucks bolted with ad hoc armor and filled with Iraqi “police,” brandishing weapons. Sometimes a convoy of some VIP or another would go by, a long string of anonymous, armored SUVs, brand new and clean.

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BAGHDAD, IRAQ: The Hands of Victory monument, erected by Saddam Hussein, is shown February 21, 2007 in Baghdad, Iraq.

I ran by the famous monument of the crossed swords everyday. The third day, I noticed a familiar blast pattern scored into the sidewalk that wasn’t there the morning before. A mortar must have hit and exploded in the night. I wondered if it got anyone.

Finally, on Saturday, I was able to leave. I took off to be embedded with the military. When I arrived at the Army base, I checked my email and had one from a friend staying with Newsweek. A few hours after I’d left, a huge and unprecedented fusillade of daytime mortars had crashed around the Green Zone, and one had landed at the front gate of the Newsweek house. Everyone in the house was shaken but fine, though their generator had been destroyed and an Iraqi man who’d worked across the street was killed. “It’s pretty bad when you feel safer out on the streets of Baghdad than in the Green Zone,” she wrote me.

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BAGHDAD, IRAQ - JUNE 14: The streets just outside the Green Zone sit empty June 14, 2007 in Baghdad, Iraq.

So that’s it for the Green Zone jogging for now. Good riddance. I’ve seen some grim places but the Green Zone has got to be one of the most strangely depressing four square miles on Earth.

It’s easy to fly to Iraq. There are three flights a day from Amman, Jordan on the country’s national carrier, Royal Jordanian Airlines; it’s about a 90 minute trip, soaring over the saffron sands of Anbar province en route to Baghdad.

Incredibly, up until a few months ago you didn’t even need to secure an Iraqi visa first: it was possible, if you knew what you were doing, to simply show up and get an “emergency visa” in a small office in Baghdad airport, filling out a form while surrounded by dozens of diminutive Sri Lankan manual laborers flown in by Halliburton and other US government contractors. I’d been doing that for a few years; but for my latest trip the government of Iraq (such as it is) has started to crack down, necessitating a trip to an Iraqi embassy in another country first to pick up a visa before arriving. There’s an Iraqi embassy in Amman, so I spent an extra day there to get the visa.

The nightstand in my hotel in Amman - it points the the way to Mecca.

I walked down from my hotel to the embassy Sunday morning to get it (Sunday, of course, being a regular workday in a Muslim country).

The embassy, a single floor building with several rooms and offices, was packed. Mostly it seemed to be Iraqis getting various paperwork related to their stays in Jordan. Though it’s hard to say; Jordanians and Iraqis don’t look or act much different, at least from a foreigner’s perspective. It wasn’t that long ago that they were all one land, of course: both part of the Ottoman Empire. Only in the 1920s, picking through the remains of the once-mighty caliphate that dissolved after WWI, did the British famously (and arbitrarily) draw borders and create all these new countries. Iraq was specifically formed to encompass the northern and southern petroleum fields; in a way, Iraq has been about oil from the very beginning.

Several attractive Iraqi women in Western dress were working behind the glass in the visa section of the embassy, set up almost like tellers in a bank. One, a dyed blonde with features like the actress Cameron Diaz, told me that they normally stop handing out visas at 11 am; I was half an hour late.

“Please?” I asked, waving my passport around. “I have to fly out tomorrow morning.”

“Well, leave it here, and we’ll see what we can do. Come back in an hour.”

I went across the street, found a coffee kiosk and ordered a strong Turkish coffee, boiled by hand in a small steel decanter by a Jordanian teenager with a hip haircut and skinny jeans. An hour later, back at the embassy, Cameron Diaz smilingly handed over my passport, the ink still drying on the visa. I thanked her and headed out.

The view of Amman from the back of a cab.

I tried to hail a cab but they were all full, so I walked up the hill, back to my hotel, not terribly far away.

As I walked, I thought about how easy it is for a society to come unglued. Amman and Baghdad, very similar cities, in a lot of ways, populated by the same kind of people. And there I was, casually doing things in Amman that would get me killed in an instant in today’s Baghdad - walking the streets alone, speaking in English, waving an American passport around. Twenty years ago, Baghdad was the cosmopolitan capital where you went to get a whiskey and do business; Amman was the backwater. Four years of a power vacuum has utterly transformed Baghdad, once one of the Middle East’s safest cities, into a nightmare of blast walls, bombings, organized crime and deadly insurgent checkpoints.

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After spending much of the last six years covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I felt like I needed to visit Arlington National Cemetery this Memorial Day weekend. I felt like I owed it some time.

I went with my family - my pregnant wife and my young daughter. Separately and together, my wife and I have covered a lot of heart-wrenching stories around the world, but Section 60 was unlike any place we had been.

The beauty and serenity of Virginia’s rolling hills and awe inspiring views of Washington D.C. clash with today’s reality of national loss, where grief is raw and in your face. You step over grass sods still taking root over freshly dug graves. You watch a mother kiss her son’s tombstone. Two soldiers put flowers and a cold beer next to the grave of a fallen buddy. A young son left a hand-written note for his dad. “I hope you like Heven, hope you liked Virginia very much hope you like the Holidays. I also see you every Sunday. Please write back!”

Section 60 is not about a troop surge or a war spending bill or whether we should be fighting these wars at all. It is about ordinary people trying to get through something so hard that most of us can’t ever imagine it. Everyone I met that afternoon had a gut-wrenching story to tell.

Mary McHugh is one of those people. She sat in front of the grave of her fiance James “Jimmy” Regan, talking to the stone. She spoke in broken sentences between sobs, gesturing with her hands, sometimes pausing as if she was trying to explain, with so much left needed to say.

Later on, after she spoke with a fellow mourner from a neighboring grave, I went over and introduced myself and told her I was photographing for Getty Images and had brought my family on our own pilgrimage to the site. I told her we had been living in Pakistan for the last few years, how we had come back to the States for a few months for the birth of our second child.

Mary told me about her slain fiance Jimmy Regan. Clearly, she had not only loved him but truly admired him. When he graduated from Duke, he decided to enlist in the Army to serve his country. He chose not to be an officer, though he could have been, because he didn’t want to risk a desk job. Instead, he became an Army Ranger and was sent twice to Aghanistan and Iraq - an incredible four deployments in just three years. He was killed in Iraq this February by a roadside bomb.

I told her how I had spent a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan, photographing American troops in combat. I told her that earlier this year I was a month in Ramadi and then a few more weeks in a tough spot called Helmand. I told her how I am going back to Iraq sometime this summer and that I was very sorry to see her this Memorial Day in the national cemetery, visiting a grave.

Mary said that they had planned to get married after Jimmy’s four years of service were up next year. “We loved each other so much,” she said. “We thought we had all of the time in the world.”

After a few moments more, my beautiful wife, Gretchen, now almost 9 months pregnant, walked over with our two-year-old Isabella. Our daughter started climbing over me, saying “daddy” in my ear and pulling on my arm to come walk with her. I felt awkward and guilty about the contrast, but if Mary felt it too, she was nothing but gracious and friendly. I told her that I would forward her some photos of her from that day if she would like and she gave me her email address. We said our goodbyes and I moved on with my family through the sea of graves.

Later on, I passed by and she was lying in the grass sobbing, speaking softly to the stone, this time her face close to the cold marble, as if whispering into Jimmy’s ear.

Some people feel the photo I took at the moment was too intimate, too personal. Like many who have seen the picture, I felt overwhelmed by her grief, and moved by the love she felt for her fallen sweetheart.

After so much time covering these wars, I have some difficult memories and have seen some of the worst a person can see - so much hatred and rage, so much despair and sadness. All that destruction, so much killing. And now, one beautiful and terribly sad spring afternoon amongst the rows and rows of marble stones - a young woman’s lost love.

I felt I owed the Arlington National Cemetery a little time - and I think I still do. Maybe we all do.

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Competitors hurtle downhill during the annual cheese-rolling at Brockworth in Gloucestershire - a tradition thought to date back to Roman times. The activity involves scores of runners chasing a seven-pound wheel of Double Gloucester down a near vertical slope.

After a two-mile walk through shin deep mud and streams, I arrived at the bottom of the course where I was ushered into a make-shift press enclosure. A barrier made of hay bails kept all the media in one place as well as protecting all of the expensive equipment from the seven pound wheel of cheese (which I have been told can reach up to 70 mph). I captured the spills, flips and aerial ballet moves as the racers crashed down the near vertical face of the hill.

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Among the various contenders were lots of Australian and New Zealand backpackers as well as others dressed in traditional costumes. One particular man managed to complete 30 percent of the hill backwards. Around 20 people had to be treated for injuries.

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After a few runs I was left to complete my own course back down the hill to find my car (which was not without its own challenges). However, it was far safer and a lot cleaner than the ancient sport I was leaving behind!

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Virgina Tech’s Liviu Librescu, who survived the Holocaust, sacrificed his own life to protect his students during the deadliest shooting rampage in modern American history. Librescu attempted to block the classroom door from the gunman, providing enough time for his students to escape through the windows. His heroism resonated far beyond campus and has become a source of pride for Jews around the globe. One can only imagine what passed through his mind in those final moments, but it’s possible to speculate that his experience as a Holocaust survivor enabled him to rapidly react to calamity. Perhaps he, more than anyone else, was capable of believing that the unbelievable was actually occurring.

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The professor’s body was flown to New York and he was given a ceremonial funeral in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park in Brooklyn. Although he never lived in New York and the funeral was hastily arranged, a crowd of Orthodox Jews seemed to materialize out of nowhere as the funeral began. His wife, Marlena, was swarmed by the media as she entered. She seemed amazed by the frenzy around her and was almost too shy to be interviewed.

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We were not allowed to shoot inside, but his casket was soon carried out and up the street by a group of Orthodox men. Most of these men had never met Librescu, yet they appeared to be deeply honored to perform this ritual. Their Jewish tradition places strong value in this act, with the notion that caring for those unable to return kindness is a pure form of giving. Librescu’s body was then flown to Israel where he was buried. In the Jewish faith it is said that to save one life is to save the world. Librescu saved many.

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The ICU, or Intensive Care Unit, is a part of all hospitals that thankfully few of us will see. Most of us have heard news reports of people who have been in tragic stories who have been “rushed to Intensive Care”. But what is this place? How does it work? Does it look like it does in House or Grey’s Anatomy?

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I was fortunate enough to be invited into the real world of the ICU to document the incredible work done there by the dedicated ICU staff nurses and doctors. The Intensive Care Foundation has an annual appeal from 10-23 April, to raise money and community awareness about what the ICU achieves, and the foundation asked me to come along to photograph a documentary piece so that seldom seen media images could be viewed by the widest possible audience. The foundation, and my contact within it, Monique Pockett, had arranged for me to visit 4 separate ICU’s over Sydney over a week.

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First stop was the Royal North Shore hospital (RNS). Within the RNS ICU I first met patient Gemma McHardy, a teenager who has been in the ICU for 3 months. Around her bed the walls and windows were covered with photos of her and her friends in happier times, get well messages, magazine clippings with photos of her idols. Directly above her bed pasted on the ceiling were photos of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Leonardo DiCaprio, and a handwritten poster saying “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better and better”. Gemma was due to go home “soon”, and it was clearly this fact that kept her bouyant as her mother Anne talked to her about school and fed her home made pumpkin soup.

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Throughout my visits to the RNS, Westmead and The Prince of Wales ICU’s, similar heroic stories emerged from patients and staff alike. Each ICU was very different physically, with the Westmead offering each patient a separate room, where their status was monitored from outside by dedicated nurses perched before monitors showing their vital signs, reams of paperwork on medication, history etc and the best diagnosis tool of all, a large window to observe through. ICU director at the Westmead Dr Yugan Mudaliar is the most ebullient man I have ever met, and I got the feeling that showing me through his ICU was a source of considerable and justifiable pride.

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At the Prince Of Wales, patient Joel Cabides had a disco mirror-ball hanging from the ceiling and a large whiteboard behind his bed on which was written “1 Blink = Yes; 2 Blinks = No”. Enough said. Even through all of this trauma, Joel smiled broadly at the arrival of a press photographer, an interesting diversion maybe, and his father Joel Sr. joked with him as he massaged his son’s hands as I took photos.

Nothing was going to prepare me for the scenes inside the Westmead Children’s ICU though. As the father of a seven month-old boy, I felt as though this one would be tough, but it was much harder than that. Three month-old baby girl Eva Cole, her bed space festooned with monitors, equipment, wires, slept peacefully as her mum Sophie kept vigil, stroking her face and feet as the ICU staff bustled by, checking on her and her mum as they went. In the next bed, four year-old Byron Campbell was quietly sitting up, blowing soap bubbles from a wand held by a physiotherapist. It turned out this was no mere boredom-relief activity but a wonderfully engaging part of his recovery process, helping his lungs recover as well as his mind as the bubbles floated across the ward. Ashley Walton, 14, was wheeled off to get a scan by porter Joe Borgia, who was wise-cracking all of the way, keeping patient, mother, and staff smiling all the way. Seeing these kids, watching them dealing with their situation, and their stoic parents masking their concern, my mind is constantly on my own family, and I understand what these parents must be thinking - that they would do anything to swap places with their child in pain.

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With my week inside the ICU over, I relive the moments I encountered with the incredible patients and staff as I edit the pictures. As I edit them, I am amazed at some of the facts that the ICU foundation can boast. Out of the 148,000 patients admitted to ICU’s across Australia and New Zealand each year, 86% of adults and a staggering 97% of children survive, pure testament to the care they receive and their will to live.

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And no, they don’t look like they do in House or Greys…they look real.