1. JOSEPH THOMAS: THE GUARDIAN OF MONKEY ISLAND

A tongue of land surrounded by two salty rivers, Liberia, Africa. This is Monkey Island, named after all the chimpanzees that were used as laboratory guinea pigs for hepatitis B research and then abandoned by the same American researchers who fled because of the outbreak of civil war, on ‘the island of monkeys’. Monkeys which were abandoned in solitude and behind bars, to prevent them from infecting others of their kind they, unable to look after themselves having been accustomed to dependence on mankind. They would not have survived without Joseph Thomas, who has been caring for them on a daily basis for forty years, giving each of them a name and affection. 

2. NAOTO MATSUMURA: THE GUARDIAN OF THE ANIMALS

In the deserted Fukushima, following the nuclear disaster caused by the 2011 tidal wave, few inhabitants remain: animals abandoned by the 17,000 people fled hoping for a return that never happened. There are hundreds of cows, dozens of pigs, dogs, cats, chickens and even an ostrich. It is Naoto who takes care of them, in the desolation of a ghost town that has not yet been decontaminated and from which he refuses to escape  

3. BILLY BARR: THE SNOW GUARDIAN OF COLORADO

As the sole inhabitant of the ghost town of Gothic in the shadow of the West Elk Mountains (Rocky Mountains) since 1973, he began documenting the climate almost as a joke. His winters of meticulous study of snow behaviour, temperatures and the animals that inhabit the area, prove to be pure gold for the scientific community, to the point that National Geographic dedicates a short film to him. 

4. THE GUARDIANS OF THE AMAZON RAINFOREST

In 2012, the Guajajara Indians established a special corps, the Guardiões da Floresta, a group of indigenous activists dedicated to the surveillance of a territory that their people have inhabited for centuries and that they now have to protect from illegal loggers and gold diggers (garimpeiros), as well as from landowners who damage the environment and trample on human rights with total indifference of the state authorities. Some of them sacrifice their lives for the cause, falling victim to ambushes. 

5. THE AKASHINGA GUARDIANS

Every eight hours in Africa a rhinoceros is killed for its horn while a total of 20,000 elephants are killed each year, not counting lions, leopards and buffalo. The trade of exotic animals destroys ecosystems, also endangering human lives and increasing the possibility of conflicts. In Zimbabwe’s southern Zambezi Valley, a task force of only female rangers challenges the risks of poaching large African mammals. They call them ‘Akashinga’, which in Chishona means ‘the brave ones’. 

6.GRANT RYAN AND HANNAH SUTTON: THE LAST GUARDIANS OF THELIGHTHOUSES

The Maatsuyker Island lighthouse is one of the last in Australia to still receive the care of lighthouse keepers. It is the young couple Grant Ryan and Hannah Sutton who look after it today, leading an isolated life immersed in the wildest and most capricious nature. Delving into their everyday life is also a way of reflecting on the end of an era and of an ancestral and romantic role, that of the lighthouse keeper, which has always fascinated the collective imagination and is now almost everywhere completely automated. 

7. MAURO MORANDI: THE ‘ITALIAN ROBINSON CRUSOE

A guardian for 32 years of the island of Budelli, one of the most beautiful and wild islands in the Mediterranean, where he landed completely by chance in 1989 during a catamaran voyage to Polynesia. It was a conscious choice of his, to get away from modern society, a society he despised, and put himself at the service of nature. Retreating to an old shelter built during World War II, he dedicated his life to caring for the island, keeping it tidy and protecting it from possible fires and the ravages of mass tourism. Today, at the age of 81, Morandi has finally decided to leave the island, evicted by the local authorities and thus reluctantly forced to abandon his hermitage, his home and the still unspoilt nature to which he has dedicated his life.   

8. GIOVANNI MORTARA: THE GUARDIAN OF THE GLACIERS

A solitary, shy and reserved figure, he is dedicated to the protection and preservation of glaciers, those constantly moving water giants that are advancing and melting in a fatal and unstoppable process due to global warming. A CNR geologist for forty years and the ‘doyen’ of the Italian Glaciological Committee, the army of ice guardians, Mortara has chosen his own glacier to look after, the Belvedere Glacier on the eastern slope of Monte Rosa in Macugnaga, to which he has dedicated himself since 1978, mostly alone, in an almost perfect symbiosis with the natural element whose every strength and weakness he knows.