featured image | Samuel Toh

I wasn’t looking for anything.

I was deep in the trenches of another article – about honeybees, wild bees, and the strange position I inhabit as a beekeeper in a debate that has turned oddly moralistic. I was reading my way through a small avalanche of Guardian pieces on pollinators and pesticides, trying to get my bearings, when I clicked on a gallery link: Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2025 – in pictures. The Guardian

You probably know the kind of gallery I mean. One astonishing image after another. Technically perfect. Striking colours. Dramatic moments compressed into a single frame. Lions, penguins, wolves, jellyfish, elephants, all crafted to arrest our attention.

I scrolled. I admired. I kept scrolling.

And then – I stopped.

There it was: a small, almost unspectacular picture, titled No Place Like Home, by French photographer Emmanuel Tardy. A brown-throated three-toed sloth clinging to a barbed-wire fencepost at the edge of a dirt track in Costa Rica, where farmland meets the remnant of forest.

And suddenly everything inside me broke open.
No warning, no buildup. Just: stop. Look. And then tears, pouring down my face.

What is this?

I don’t mean: What a powerful photograph. I mean something more unsettling, more intimate: What is this power that something in the world still has, in spite of everything, to pierce straight into my core? What is this invisible thread between a bewildered animal on the far side of the planet and one human being doom-scrolling on a laptop in Scotland?

And – perhaps the real question – what is this “core” that can still be touched at all?

Saturated and numb

We live in a kind of permanent weather of images.

War footage next to cat videos. Floods and fires, then a recipe reel. A documentary on coral bleaching, followed by a comedian lip-syncing into their phone. Our feeds are full of superlatives: the most shocking, the cutest ever, the top ten, the must-see. We consume horror in the evening as entertainment and wake up to fresh horror packaged as news.

Ecological catastrophe has its own aesthetic now – drone shots of burning forests, emaciated polar bears, before-and-after glaciers. Most of us have scrolled through more images of suffering than any previous generation, and at the same time we are entertained by violence, by thriller plots, by hyper-stylised destruction. And then, as relief, we click over to influencers bathing in sunlight, sponsored clothes, soft filters, their lives apparently frictionless and clean.

It’s not that none of this affects us. It does – but often in a shallow, passing way. A small tightening in the chest. A muttered “oh no”. A flicker of envy. A sigh. And then the thumb moves again. Next. Next. Next.

So when I say this one photograph stopped me, I mean it quite literally. The scrolling halted. My usual defences – the thin, glossy layer of “I’ve seen it all” – cracked. I was not offended, not outraged, not shocked in the usual sense. I was undone.

A very quiet apocalypse

If you haven’t seen the image, let me try to describe it.

There is nothing overtly dramatic going on. No predator mid-kill. No storm tearing trees apart. On one side of the frame, a strip of tropical greenery – the ragged edge of Costa Rican forest. On the other, an open piece of pasture. Between them: a dirt track and a barbed-wire fence, its posts made of rough concrete, its strands holding an invisible line of property and control.

And on one of those posts, clinging with all four limbs, is the sloth.

At first glance, it’s simply “a sloth being a sloth”: shaggy coat, moon-round face, that odd mouth that can look like a gentle grin, the heavy eyelids. But the longer you look, the less neutral it becomes. The animal’s whole being is gathered into this embrace. It holds the post the way a child clings to a parent’s leg at the moment of separation; the way someone in freefall grabs the nearest solid thing and does not let go.

The barbed wire slices straight through the scene, quiet and matter-of-fact. It’s a piece of agricultural infrastructure, nothing more, and yet here it suddenly appears like a symbol of everything: this thin, brutal line separating “productive land” from “the rest”. The post is maybe the closest vertical object after the sloth has crossed the road. It is, to its senses, the nearest thing that resembles a tree. So it climbs.

The story behind the photograph, as told by the Natural History Museum in London, is simple. Tardy watched as traffic slowed to let the animal cross the road in El Tanque, a rural district where habitat fragmentation forces sloths to spend more time on the ground, making risky journeys between patches of forest. The Guardian+2Natural History Museum+2

That’s all. Nothing overtly catastrophic happens in the frame. No blood, no flames, no bulldozers. And yet when I look at this sloth clinging to a concrete post, I feel, with almost unbearable clarity, the whole slow catastrophe of our time.

It looks like pure despair, and at the same time, like pure innocence.

Being touched vs being impressed

We often talk about “powerful images”, but usually what we mean is something closer to “impressive”. Our attention is jolted by scale, colour, novelty, the cleverness of composition. We say: what a shot, what light, what timing.

This picture works differently. It’s almost the opposite of spectacular. The composition is straightforward. The light is soft, ordinary. A friend could have taken it on their phone (they didn’t; there is technical craft here, but it doesn’t shout about itself).

What hit me was not aesthetic admiration, but a sort of naked contact.

To be impressed is, in a strange way, still safe. We can admire from a distance. We can read the caption, nod in recognition, perhaps share the image with a few words of outrage or sadness, and then rejoin the stream of content.

Being touched is different. Something breaks into our day that we did not schedule. It interrupts, rearranges, opens questions we cannot tidy away. It does not simply add another piece of information to our minds; it finds a way in through some small, unguarded door and sets up camp in the heart.

When I say I started sobbing, I don’t mean a theatrical reaction. I mean: a raw, involuntary response. My body knew something long before my thinking mind could catch up.

What is it that gets touched?

This is where, for me, the deeper questions begin.

Because we could keep the whole experience on the surface: poor sloth, habitat fragmentation, conservation, wildlife corridors – and all of that is real. In fact, Costa Rica’s government is, right now, working with conservation groups to create biological corridors, including aerial bridges that reconnect sloths with their forest homes. The Guardian+2Live Science+2

But my tears did not begin with policy. They began somewhere far less articulated.

What is this place inside me that still responds, that still feels pierced by a single small creature in an anonymous field? After so many images, so much information, so much well-founded climate anxiety, so many calls to action, so much rhetorical “we must” and “time is running out” – what is it that remains soft enough to be reached?

When I sit with the question, words like these come:
recognition, kinship, helplessness, guilt, tenderness, grief.

Recognition, because I know this posture from the inside: the clinging to something that is clearly wrong for us simply because it is the only thing available. Kinship, because at some level we are that sloth, hanging on to the concrete posts of our own way of life, even as it hurts and confines us. Helplessness, because I cannot step into the frame and carry the animal back into the forest. Guilt, because the fence, the road, the broken habitat – all of these belong to the civilisation that provides my comfort, my computer, my time to write. Tenderness, because the sloth is so utterly without guile or accusation. Grief, because this one frame stands for countless journeys that end less well, out of sight of any camera.

Maybe that is part of the mystery: a truly touching image does not just show them – animals, strangers, victims. It shows us, in ways we did not expect and would never have chosen.

The world reaching back

There is a temptation to talk about “the power of photography” here – and certainly, this competition, run annually by the Natural History Museum, exists precisely because a single frame can condense a whole web of relationships between humans and the more-than-human world. Live Science+1

But I want to be careful not to stop at the medium.

Because what moved me, ultimately, was not the skill of the photographer (though I honour it), but the fact that something in reality still has the ability, through all the layers of mediation, to reach through the glass screens and conceptual armour and find living tissue.

It is as if the world, in all its bruised vulnerability, occasionally manages to send us a direct message. Not a marketing message, not a neatly packaged campaign, but a raw communiqué: “I am still here. And you are still capable of feeling that.”

In that sense, the mystery is double:

• Out there, in Costa Rica, a sloth mistakes a concrete post for a tree, and in doing so unknowingly reveals the fault line between wild and domesticated, between continuity and rupture, between a slow, leaf-eating life and the speed of roads and fences.
• In here, in me, there is still some un-numb place that recognises this as meaningful, as intolerable, as heartbreakingly beautiful and sad.

Between those two poles – sloth and human, roadside and screen – runs an invisible thread. Call it empathy, call it conscience, call it the more-than-personal heart. Whatever word we use, it’s worth paying attention whenever we feel that thread tug.

After the tears

I still don’t have answers.

I don’t know how we should live with the knowledge that our way of organising land and economy produces scenes like this every day. I don’t know what will finally tip our societies into truly prioritising the living world over short-term profit. I don’t know how many more images of loss and fracture we will need before something fundamental shifts.

What I do know is that it matters enormously that we have not yet lost the capacity to be touched.

Because without that, nothing else follows. Policy, activism, lifestyle changes, new stories about who we are in relation to the earth – all of these begin, I suspect, with moments that cannot be fully explained: a photograph, a sudden grief, a wordless love for some ordinary creature or place.

So I keep returning to this picture. I let it disturb me. I resist the urge to turn it too quickly into an emblem or a slogan. Instead, I ask it – or perhaps I ask that core in myself that trembles when I see it:

What are you showing me? What is it you are asking of me?

And maybe that is the most honest invitation I can offer you, reading this. Not a neat takeaway, but a question:

In this age of polished content and endless reels – of curated outrage and packaged hope – what still has the power to stop you mid-scroll, to break into your day uninvited, to move you to tears or silence?

When that happens, perhaps our task is simply this:
not to rush past it.
To let ourselves be touched, even if we do not yet know what will grow from that touch.