Mike Fay has many titles: botanist, anthropologist, conservationist, but perhaps none as fitting as modern-day explorer.
"This world has an incredible abundance in nature, and this planet has this unbelievable complexity and diversity that has evolved over time, and to think we can squander that in a few centuries is to me, I think, is insanity," Fay said.
Fay recently spent seven months photographing Africa from the air. During that time, he snapped more than 100,000 pictures -- a detailed record of the effects of the human footprint, as he calls it, on the landscape.
"There is almost not a square inch of that continent that is being currently used by human beings in a very substantial way," he said.
Some of the images are extremely disturbing. One is a graveyard filled with AIDS victims in South Africa. Many of the images are extremely beautiful.
"Sand dunes in the Sahara Desert, they look almost glassy, they look like cream on a cake," Fay said. "The mix between the turquoise water and white sand of the Indian Ocean with these homemade boats and people living these kind of idyllic lives in paradise in Mozambique, wow. Me, I was just blown away by that place."
This trip wasn't Fay's first foray into Africa. In 1999, he spent a year-and-a-half walking through part of Central Africa. He was there to document the vanishing wilderness.
Trekking through 1,200 miles of jungle, rivers, swamps, most of the trip in his sandals. He got sick and lost about 30 pounds.
"After three months, I found my body didn't have sores anymore," Fay said. "I felt really strong, I wasn't tired. I felt like superman or Tarzan.
"I wanted to experience what no other human being has experienced -- gorillas and elephants and chimps, you know, all these things, and at the same time try to convince the world at large we have to preserve some of this."
And he has begun to change some minds. In 2002, he met with the president of Gabon in Western Africa.
