An artist and dedicated environmentalist, Annie Leibovitz is known around the world for her portraits of celebrities and political icons. Her haunting black and white photographs of the Shawangunk Mountains in New York can be seen in The Nature Conservancy’s exhibition, In Response to Place. (Photo by Paul Gilmore)

I wish that all of nature’s magnificence, the emotion of the land, the living energy of place could be photographed. Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy—your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself.

I love to spend time in the woods near my home in upstate New York. They never fail to evoke an emotional response in me. The lines of the horizon, the gentle curve of the trees. I feel a responsibility to my backyard, I want it to be taken care of and protected.

My hope is that we continue to nurture the places that we love, but that we also look outside our immediate worlds, to the foreign and the far away. There are still so many places on our planet for me that remain unexplored. I’d love to one day peel back the mystery and understand them.

I know I’ll never be able to experience them all, but I’d like to think that the actions we take today will allow others in the future to discover the wonders of landscapes we helped protect but never had the chance to enjoy ourselves.