By MATTHEW STOSS
GW Magazine / Spring 2019

Kate Brooks is a widely traveled and well-imperiled photojournalist who has been a fixture in combat zones since 9/11. The former GW student—she truncated her college career at 19 years old to move abroad after a National Geographic internship—counts at least seven times when she thought tomorrow would be for everyone else.

On an arctic January Monday afternoon in a Columbia Heights coffee shop that looks like a thousand others, Brooks shares her I-could’ve-died figure by rote as she eats chocolate pie, cream on the side.

“It depends on the circumstances,” she says. “For the most part, I had pretty close calls in Afghanistan, but I worked there over a period of 10 years. And if you added up all the days, it’s probably the equivalent of 700 days. In terms of the times I really thought it might be my last day, it was probably only seven times.”

Depending on how intimate you are with your mortality, a 1 percent rate of almost being killed is either untenable or pretty good. For Brooks, an outwardly reserved 41-year-old with a firm presence that precedes her, it’s pretty good.

“Yeah, it’s not bad,” she says. “But you go into a lot of situations, and it’s a little bit nerve-wracking for the most part. It became more and more dangerous over time. Early on [in Afghanistan], people were quite vulnerable, but the Taliban were collapsing, and then as time went on, they kind of reemerged as an anti-insurgent force. Obviously, you have suicide bombings and things all the time now.”

We veer from war to talk about why she’s in D.C. and not home in London, where the Buffalo, N.Y., native recently moved after eight years in Beirut and a longer-than-wanted sojourn in Los Angeles.

Brooks spent the past six years planning, directing, editing and now promoting The Last Animals, a critically esteemed, unscripted documentary about the poaching of African elephants and rhinoceroses for their tusks and horns, set primarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Garamba National Park.

She’s been in L.A. touching up the film, which debuted at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, winning the Disruptor Innovation Award, and gets its U.S. release April 22. It will air on the National Geographic Channel at noon (Eastern Standard Time), then be available on the Nat Geo website and various video-on-demand platforms. It comes to Hulu on May 1.

Right now, Brooks is in Washington for a conference at National Geographic headquarters. She’s serving as the “Q” in a Q&A with a fellow photojournalist who, like Brooks, has of late detoured from war to conservation. Here, at the first of three stops, two coffee shops and an Italian restaurant, Brooks tells her only war story today, on a solemn afternoon that persisted for quiet hours into a colder evening.

“In 2005, I did this story for Time magazine called ‘The Forgotten War’ and it was about the situation in Afghanistan getting worse when all eyes were on Iraq,” Brooks says. “I was embedded with a unit, and within the first 45 minutes of the embed, the vehicle in front of mine got blown up. This medevac team flew in, in the dead of night. It was right after a firefight. The IED was actually the start of an ambush—cars driving towards us, people shooting at us, people in the fields around us, heavily armed. It was pretty terrifying.”

It was September or October. The Humvee, part of an Army convoy, hit an IED. Four soldiers were in that Humvee. The medevac team shortly arrived.

“I was just very struck by their bravery,” Brooks says. “So in 2010, I did a medevac embed in southern Afghanistan. It was truly horrific. Lots of soldiers who were double and triple amputees, day in and day out, and kids getting bombed who were basically getting hellfire strikes called in on them because a drone operator thought they were digging IEDs when they weren’t.”

Brooks’s reservedness is only outward.

“At the end of the embed, I was scheduled to go to Kenya to visit a friend,” she says. “She took me to the Masai Mara [National Reserve] and I was thinking about everything I’d just seen and witnessed. A lot of it was extremely disturbing, even though I’d been covering conflict for years. And I was sitting by a pool and looking through a pair of binoculars, and a herd of elephants walked across my eyeline, for the first time, in this really beautiful sunset. It was just a reminder that on a cellular level, that in spite of all this human destruction, on the plain, there’s still a natural order. That’s really what made me want to shift focus from human conflict to environmental issues.”

“How far away were the elephants?” I say.

“They’re weren’t super close.”

“What were they doing?”

“They were just walking, being elephants.”

It’s a little weird to watch Kate Brooks, she who works upwind of death, just order iced coffee and chocolate pie in a café while us regular sorts poke about on laptops. By the time we got our bachelor’s degrees, Brooks had dispensed with all the self-preservation she could spare to chase war in strange and angry lands.

Brooks was 23 years old on Sept. 11, 2001, and at the time living in Moscow. Three years earlier, she broke international news, exposing Russian orphanages for abusing and neglecting children. The piece established her photojournalistic gravitas, and the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attack, she says, inspired her to become a war photographer. She calls it the “story of her generation” and says she couldn’t “imagine being a photojournalist and not covering the aftermath of 9/11.”

People magazine sent her to Pakistan, where a four-day assignment became a two-and-a-half-year residence. Based in Islamabad, Brooks traveled frequently to Afghanistan and Iraq and other combat-riven locales around and about the Middle East to document the “War on Terror” and the worst of men for National Geographic, Newsweek, Smithsonian, Time and U.S. News and World Report. She embedded with all manner of military in Earth’s ancient, far-off places and she endured firefights and bombs and friends dying, and things we only think we know about because of movies and televsion.

“She does look tough,” says Davida Heller, BA ’99, who’s been a dear friend of Brooks since college. Heller is now a senior vice president for corporate sustainability at Citi in New York. “She has seen so much suffering—but then you see some of her photos. They have such light. There’s a glimmer. You think you’re going to see this tough, hardened, intimidating person—but she’s soft. It’s right under the surface. You just to have knock and there it is. ... You get the feeling that she’s really trying to make an impact, to make a difference.”

Brooks, who wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up, took a photojournalism class during the fall semester of her freshman year at GW. It stirred an interest in photography latent since high school, where she learned Russian and fed a Soviet fascination kindled by her coming of age as the U.S.S.R. folded. Longtime National Geographic photo editor John Echave taught the GW course. Brooks was 17.

It led to a glamour-thin National Geographic internship the ensuing semester. She toiled in photo operations, organizing and sorting slides while getting a deep peek inside the industry. Inspirited, she abandoned college during the second semester of her sophomore year, moved to London and then Moscow, and turned pro.

“I found her to be very focused,” says Echave, retired from Nat Geo and professoring and now dabbling in documentary filmmaking. He and Brooks remain friends. If she goes what he feels like is too long between hellos, Echave emails her just to see if she’s OK. “Of the whole class, she was the only one that you could tell was very intense and very focused on learning how to communicate an idea with pictures.

“For a project for the class, a kind of photo story, I think she went up to Columbia Heights and photographed, as often as she could, the place, the people, the surroundings to give us a sense as to what it was really like. … What struck me was that she didn’t just walk around the streets, just taking pictures of buildings and that kind of thing. As I remember, she was able to synthesize in her mind what she needed to do to convey the smell and the look and the essence of the place in photographs.”

Brooks’s work is bold, contemplative, scary, intimate, “in your face,” Echave says. She eschews long lenses so she can be close to her subjects, has a feel for natural light, and she layers her compositions. The foregrounds, middle-grounds and backgrounds are delineated as if the photo’s a flattened diorama, often with background action complementing or subverting what’s in front of it.

Beyond war, Brooks has photographed poverty and wildlife, everyday existence as well as royalty and non-monarchical heads of state. She’s done portraits of the Saudi royal family, former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf and former Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai.

“She has a real compassion for the people she’s photographing, for the places, for the animals,” says Molly Roberts, the chief photo editor at National Geographic who worked often with Brooks during a 16-year stint at Smithsonian magazine. She describes Brooks’s eye as “quiet.”

“She’s a very committed storyteller,” Roberts continues, “and she has what you’d call the tenacity to really get to the root of the story and to get the kind of access that she needs to tell the stories she tells. I think she’s a bit fearless. I’ve always respected that about her. She can definitely wrangle access into places that I’m sometimes surprised that she gets. …

“I think there’s something about her that elicits people’s trust, and that’s really an important quality to have. It’s probably just an extension of her general good-naturedness, that compassionate quality. She’s soft-spoken, but when she speaks, she’s very thoughtful about the way she communicates, and I think when confronted by people like that, that often doors open that don’t open to people who project that they’re important and entitled to be there.”

Kate Brooks, bundled all in black, and I have endured a short, unwarm walk to Venue the Second: another coffee shop.

This one has less charm and worse music played louder. The staff drops a lot of stuff and there are cranberry-orange muffins. Brooks takes the window seat of an alcove that’s aspiring to breakfast nook-dom. She is discussing her conversion from war photographer to conservationist.

Later, she would describe it as more thorough than an epiphany, but now she’s getting into the fine print of her awakening.

“When I moved into conservation, nobody had any idea who I was or what I had done,” Brooks says. “It was very strange because I had gotten used to, a lot of the time, depending on what I was doing, circumstances where people knew who I was and knew my work, and that alone would open doors. It was like starting from scratch.”

“How did you end up with those guys, then?” I say, asking about her embedding with the Garamba Park rangers for her documentary. “What did you have to do to convince the park rangers to take you out on patrols?”

“It’s not really convincing them so much. If you go out there to film, there’s an extensive filming contract. It’s really getting permission from the park administrators.”

That took about nine months. Concurrently, she researched and read, courting and blandishing big-cheese conservationists to build her credibility and cultivate sources. She also did a fellowship in 2013 at the University of Michigan, where she conceived the film that would become The Last Animals.

The title, she says, came first. Humans are the last animals. The documentary piggybacked off a major Smithsonian magazine story, “The Race to Stop Africa’s Elephant Poachers,” for which Brooks provided the photography. The story ran in July 2014 and was set in Chad’s Zakouma National Park. A year earlier, in one incident hundreds of miles to the southwest, poachers killed at least 86 elephants near the Cameroon border.

“That’s when my awareness of the poaching crisis really started picking up,” Brooks says. “Reading about that, I just knew I had to pick up my camera and try to tell their story, tell the story of what was happening to elephants.”

The setting for The Last Animals is Garamba National Park, a Delaware-size hunk of natural majesty that accounts for 0.35 percent of the 905,568 square-mile Democratic Republic of Congo. The preserve, founded in 1938 and designated a World Heritage site in 1980, occupies a northeastern bit of the DRC and sits flush against the South Sudan border.

It is a remote place, reached only by odyssey. First, you fly to the Ugandan city of Arua, which is a seven-hour drive on roads of varying fitnesses to the DRC’s western border. The Garamba website, however, discourages driving because of the bad roads—the DRC’s also still politically convalescing after a nine-year civil war that ended in 2003—and suggests would-be visitors hire a “small plane” out of Arua for a one-hour flight to the park’s personal airstrip.

There, assault rifle-armed park rangers welcome visitors, almost all of which are scientists and journalists. Garamba woos few tourists. Brooks says she didn’t see a single one during her and her three-man crew’s two trips to film in the park.

They spent three-and-a-half nonconsecutive weeks on patrol with the rangers, trudging bush and savanna in the wet and equatorial heat. Brooks, maybe underselling her stamina, says she did no camping trips. The rangers stay out for days and nights at a time.

The exact strength of the ranger force is unclear, but it’s not more than a few hundred. They guard Garamba’s wildlife, especially its 1,200 remaining elephants, each of which wears a GPS tracker. The last of Garamba’s northern white rhinos is thought to have died around 2007. As of late March, there were only two white rhinos left worldwide. Both are female.

“[The rangers] make less than $200 a month, which I think is decent by DRC standards,” Brooks says. One U.S. dollar is equal to about 1,630 Congolese francs. “But they genuinely care about the park; they care about the wildlife.”

The Last Animals follows those park rangers and the soldiers augmenting them, including DRC Army Col. Jacques Lusengo, and their daily, regularly fatal efforts to repel well-funded and well-armed poachers. The poachers are bankrolled by international criminal organizations as well as terrorist groups such as the Lord’s Resistance Army, which uses ivory, in part, to fund its diverse evils: human trafficking, kidnapping, murder and conscripting children into soldiering.

The rangers’ job also can involve protecting the people living in and around Garamba from groups like the LRA.

“I’m trying to get a sense of who these rangers are and why they do this,” I say. “It seems so much more than just protecting some elephants.”

“It’s their heritage,” Brooks says. “They have a love and appreciation of nature. They recognize this as their sovereign territory.”

In the movie, rangers apprehend four poachers, then question them. The interrogator says the poacher, a Congolese man, has attacked his “own” and “betrayed” his “country.”

“It’s hard not to feel sympathy for them, on some level,” Brooks says of the poachers. “They’re kind of a victim in this supply chain, and on other hand, they also know they’re going in and it’s illegal to be armed [in the DRC]. They’re going into a protected space. It’s illegal to kill the animals. Very often, they’re shooting at rangers.

“I think it’s easy to look at them and think how they’re so poor and vulnerable and it’s just awful, but the flip side of that is they’re also aware of the fact that they’re engaging in illegal activity and killing animals and sometimes killing people, too. So where do you stop with the sympathy?”

It’s estimated that poachers earn about 5 to 10 percent of the value of what they poach.

“What was it like being on patrol with the rangers?” I say. “I’m imagining it’s a lot of inactivity.”

“It goes from being totally quiet to all hell breaking loose.”

“What’s the mood like? Are the rangers solemn? Joking?”

“It depends on what’s going on. But there’s a camaraderie among them.”

A few weeks after Brooks left Garamba, in October 2015, poachers surrounded a 10-man park patrol that included Lusengo, who started working in the park in 1986.

A rescue helicopter got six of the men out, but it got hit in the firefight and couldn’t return for the remaining four, among them Lusengo.

Poachers killed all of them.

There is a scene in The Last Animals in which Sam Wasser, a biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, stands in front of a field of burning ivory in Nairobi National Park. The sky is gray. The smoke is black. Wasser estimates, in the moment, that represented in that fire are 10,000 elephants.

Earlier in the film, Wasser, then in Singapore, surveys a 4.6-ton ivory seizure. He looks a lot like he will later standing in the burning Kenyan field. He’s tired, frustrated, furious, sad. There, in a fenced-in parking lot where tusks are arranged by size in curling rows, he guesses that spread along the cement are a thousand elephants.

“This whole tusk weighs point-one kilo,” Wasser says in the film, examining a tusk the size of a small dagger. “I mean, why would you kill an elephant for a tenth-of-a-kilo tusk? If you look through there, there’s no ivory in here. This is ridiculous. It’s the hardest part for me, honestly. See all these little guys. Here.”

He puts his foot on the smallest tusks.

“Here. Here. And there so many that are already taken away.”

About hundred years ago, there were 5 million elephants in Africa, Wasser says. By 1979, there were 1.3 million. Ten years later, there were 600,000. Right now there are are about 400,000. There is a timeline in which Africa has no more elephants, just as there is a timeline in which Africa has no more rhinoceroses.

Today there are about 25,000 rhinos. In the mid-19th century, there were more than a million. Kate Brooks spent six years, an undisclosed amount of her money and an unquantified portion of her well-being to make The Last Animals and avert those futures.

“She has incredibly tenacity and persistence,” Wasser says. “She is extremely passionate, not only about filmmaking, but even more so about combating this trade. She didn’t just pick a topic that she thought would be a good thing to make a film on. She lives and breathes this problem, this issue. She is truly an investigator and has contributed greatly and she has realized that one powerful thing she can do is get this message out there, and so she labored against a lot of odds to make sure that that message stood true in her film, and she is now continuing to be relentless about getting the film viewed by as many people as possible—this is not to make money. She truly believes she’s got a message here that needs to be conveyed, and in my opinion, there is no other film like this out there that has been able to convey the message the way that she did.”

The largest extant land mammals, elephants have awed humans since Paleolithic times. Early humans painted elephants on cave walls, and since, elephants have abounded in religion, fiction and history. They star in the Hindu pantheon. They went skydiving in a Disney movie, and the thing most people remember about Hannibal isn’t his double envelopment of 50,000 Roman soldiers at Cannae, it’s that he took some elephants over the Alps.

Like Wasser, John Baker wants to ensure elephants do not perish. Baker is the chief program officer at WildAid, a nonprofit using data and marketing to promote conservation.

The organization takes advertising campaigns, social media and celebrity endorsements to hip the uninformed about the ills of wildlife vanity products such as shark fin, rhino horn, ivory. In China, WildAid enlisted former NBA star Yao Ming in a multimedia push against elephant poaching.

“We have all the facts and figures on this,” Baker says. “When we started the campaign in 2012, only 46 percent of the Chinese public in the urban centers thought elephant poaching was a problem. Only 33 percent of the people at the time knew that you had to kill the elephant to get the ivory. A lot of people believed that ivory came from natural mortality, or you could cut it and it could grow back, or those elephants were on a farm. We put a lot of effort into improving a lot of people’s awareness level. If you buy ivory, you are actually partaking in the killing of an elephant.”

Brooks exercises similar tactics in The Last Animals, establishing pathos and supplementing it with science.

“I have seen a bunch of these films,” Baker says, “... and from a filmmaking point of view, The Last Animals is the best of the bunch. I like how she connected, at the beginning of the film, the buying of products in northern Vietnam and then followed the thread all the way back, featuring the rangers in Garamba and the rhino efforts in Ol Pejeta [Conservancy in Kenya], getting the whole story of the northern white rhino and then going into the demand side and the fact that there was progress being made in Asia on reducing demand.”

Ivory is a luxury item, now coveted largely to demonstrate status, at least in China and Southeast Asia. In the past, it served, too, a utilitarian function. Ivory—just big elephant teeth—is strong yet easy to carve, aesthetically pleasing and non-splintering. Since the sixth century B.C. or so, it’s been used to make many, many things: buttons, combs, needles, chopsticks, billiard balls and, perhaps most famously, piano keys.

Until a law banning ivory sales took effect last year, China hosted the most robust ivory market on the planet. A just-emerged-and-flush middle class drove demand, and in 2014 at the peak of the poaching crisis, a kilogram of ivory could cost as much as $2,100. Now it’s down to about $700 because of campaigns waged by groups like WildAid and more adamantine laws in ivory-lusting places such as Vietnam and Thailand.

Rhino horn also has a luxe appeal, but demand is driven by more than common opulence. In Southeast Asia, rhino horns are traditionally believed to possess an absurd panoply of medicinal powers.

For almost 2,000 years, rhino horn has been believed capable of curing, among other maladies, fever, gout, liver problems, cancer and hangovers, despite being made of keratin. That means rhino horns are basically fingernails—and a total nostrum. And yet, in 2014, a kilogram of rhino horn could sell for as much as $65,000. Even today, a kilo of is worth $22,000. A comparable amount of gold goes for about $42,000.

Again, as with ivory, awareness efforts and laws have neutered demand, thus lowering prices and making the villainous enterprise less profitable for poachers and their criminal overlords who are often involved in other, as-villainous businesses: weapons and narcotics trafficking, terrorism and slavery.

It is estimated that poachers kill about 20,000 African elephants, 1,000 rhinos and 25 African park rangers each year.

In the backseat of a smartphone-summoned cab, a generic Barbie car-looking plastic sedan, Kate Brooks is comparing the six years of making The Last Animals to the year and a half she spent exposing cruelty in Russian orphanages.

“I felt like with both of these projects,” she says, “these were more like soul projects than passion projects, for whatever reason. I’m not a religious person but I really felt like at a certain point that I’m meant to do this. I need to see this through. And every time I thought there was no way further forward, or that I would have to give up because I couldn’t find a way forward and I had pushed everything to the absolute limits, a door would open. Something would happen to keep me going.”

Coffee Shop II closed minutes ago and we were shooed into the ebbing sunlight and flowing cold. We got the taxi because it’s a long walk and neither of us brought earmuffs. Venue the Third is a Petworth Italian restaurant, its interior red brick exposed and trendy. We commandeer a bar high-top and order drinks as happy hour breaks and the restaurant peoples.

“I felt,” Brooks says, “it was critical that I followed through on my commitment to all these people who trusted me to tell this story.”

A moment passes.

“There’s no soft way to ask this,” I say. “How many of the rangers that you were with in the park died after you left? I didn’t want to ask you that in the back of a cab. The whole thing just seems emotionally exhausting—where you’re so involved with a group of people for so many years doing something that is, in a way, one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard. Do you have trouble sleeping? I don’t know, I think I would.”

“I don’t have trouble sleeping now,” Brooks says. “I remember when I got the news that Col. Jacques and the other guys had been killed. I wept for days.”

The four men killed by poachers in October 2015 are survived by 14 children.

“Col. Jacques,” Brooks says, “I felt a very strong connection to him and just really liked him.” She pauses. “I set up a foundation, and it’s still in its infancy, but the idea is to help the children and the families in Garamba National Park. We’re raising funds for a school.”

“If I had a crystal ball,” Brooks continues, “and I had known and I could’ve looked in and seen certain experiences that I was going to have throughout the process, about the film, or known that it was going to be a six-year process and how difficult it was going to be at times, I don’t think I would’ve had the courage to start it.”

“Really?” I say. “After all the stuff you’ve done and where you’ve been?”

“To take on a six-year project and you’re 35? There’s a lot of personal sacrifice. Throughout that period of time, I started to think about having a family.”

Brooks says that for the first year and a half of making The Last Animals, which commenced filming in June 2013, she paid the crew instead of herself. Almost two years in, her funding, always piecemeal, ran thin, forcing her to cut a sizzle reel. Mark Monroe, a Last Animals co-writer who also wrote the 2009 Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, helped with that. She also sought investors.

She was supposed to spend five months editing in Los Angeles and then move to London. She stayed in L.A. about a year and a half, her stuff stuck in limbo and stewarded somewhere between Lebanon and London by a shipping company. Her cat, a ginger named Charlotte plucked from the streets of Beirut, has been with her mom in Oregon since the summer of 2017. It’s a life lived in “suspended animation.”

Brooks notices me ogling a pizza en route to others. It’s a Margherita heretically embellished with fontina cheese.

“If you order one,” she says, “I’ll definitely have a slice.”

We order a pizza and sequels to our drinks, and I ask her if she has talents beyond photography and durability. She walked off typhoid in 2001 and has otherwise evaded injury and infirment. She says she doesn’t have other talents, although a friend claims Brooks is a competent dancer. I ask about the bad things in her memory.

“I’ve always attributed that experience that I had with the elephants in Kenya to me having been able to process all these really horrific things I’d just seen,” Brooks says, “and feeling like I wanted to talk about it in the film—give them back what they had given me.”

Brooks narrates The Last Animals. She says that if there was going to be narration, it never occurred to her that she wouldn’t be the one doing it.

“Did you have trouble processing it before you saw the elephants?” I say.

“You’re talking about a few days between leaving Afghanistan and going to Kenya,” Brooks says. “But yeah, I was consumed by these things that I had just seen. They were awful. … It was the medevac thing. That’s when I was seeing lots of people, day in and day out, losing their limbs, soldiers committing suicide, children getting blown up.”

“But you’d seen that before, hadn’t you?”

“This was different.”

“Was it just the volume that you were seeing then?”

“A lot of it was the volume.”

“Or were you closer to it than you had been?”

“No, it was just different. Just different.”

The restaurant is louder but Brooks isn’t.

“What was it about the elephants?” I say.

“It’s something about creation, something that’s about beauty rather than man-made destruction,” Brooks says, “and that led me to want to help protect that.”

“Would you describe it as epiphanous?”

“I feel like epiphany might be kind of trite, in terms of what it was. It was actually much deeper than that. There’s a line in the film where I say nothing makes sense anymore, and it was literally that. It was just like, I ******* can’t—I can’t understand what human beings are doing to each other.”

That was nine years ago.

“I don’t know that it’d been festering,” Brooks says. “I’d seen lots of horrific things and I’m sure there must have been something cumulative, but it was very specific about that medevac assignment.”

“I had assumed at some level you would be inured,” I say. “Just, you see so much stuff, and to deal with that, I just thought, to continue on—and I’m not saying I thought you’d be desensitized—but as a coping mechanism, I just thought you’d have to be inured. But just everything you say, you’re on the verge of crying—”

“I’m sorry.”

“No. It’s heartening. I’m just trying to figure out how you did that for so long. In combat situations, seeing the killed elephants, did you just go back to your hotel and cry? I don’t know how you kept it together.”

“I’m pretty resilient.”

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