60 Minutes - 9/23/2018: The Dutch Solution, The Real Power of Google, Into the Wild

Episode Date: September 24, 2018

Following the devastation of Hurricanes Florence. Maria, and Harvey -- is it possible to protect ourselves from the relentless wrath of Mother Nature? Bill Whitaker finds out. Steve Kroft reports on the power of Google. Plus -- photographer Tom Mangelsen steps IN FRONT of the camera with Anderson Cooper on tonight's "60 Minutes." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side or B-side or bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. Dozens of lives were lost to Hurricane Florence, and billions will be spent over the years to try to rebuild the East Coast. It's a new normal in the era of super storms. But this Dutchman, from a city below sea level, says there's a solution for America. Invest and innovate, or pay later. There's a national flood insurance program that is going bankrupt. You pay disaster bills every year. In the rebuilding, it's costing a lot of money. It's wasted.

You think Google's a monopoly? Oh, yes. Of course Google's a monopoly. In fact, they're a monopoly in several markets. They're a monopoly in search. They're a monopoly in search advertising. They know who you are, where you are, what you just bought, what you might want to buy. And so if I'm an advertiser and I say I want 24 year old women in Nashville, Tennessee, who drive trucks and drink bourbon, I can do that? On Google. Whether it's a male grizzly bear with battle scars, a cheetah chasing down

its prey in Tanzania, or butterflies sipping on the tears of a giant caiman in Brazil, each of Tom Mangelson's photographs tells a story. Over the course of your lifetime, the amount of time you've spent waiting is incalculable, I'm sure. Stupid. Stupid? Yeah. Have you learned anything with all that waiting? You wait long enough, it does pay off. And at 72, he still travels to remote and inhospitable places. What he brings back are some of the most spectacular pictures of wild animals that you'll ever see. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Anderson Cooper.

I'm Bill Whitaker. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks. More points. More flights. More of all the things you want in a travel rewards card. And then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO VI Porter MasterCard and get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash VIPorter to learn more. When does fast

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So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Parts of the country ravaged by Hurricane Florence will slowly dry out and begin to clean up in the coming weeks. Many communities in the Carolinas hadn't yet recovered from Hurricane Matthew two years ago. The relentless cycle of disaster, rebuild, repeat, has many coastal residents feeling numb and helpless.

And climate scientists say we can expect more frequent, more powerful storms in the future. We heard that the Netherlands, one of the most flood-prone places in the world, almost never floods. Holland is about twice the size of New Jersey and is one of the world's most densely populated countries. Much of it is below sea level. Yet the Dutch don't bother with flood insurance. They don't need it. As the U.S. cleans up from Hurricane Florence, we were wondering, do the Dutch have a solution?

It was a disaster that unfolded in slow motion. For four days, Hurricane Florence crawled up the East Coast, dumping record rainfall more than 35 inches in North Carolina, flooding thousands of homes and taking dozens of lives. The destruction from Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey and Maria cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Florence is another chapter in a story we know all too well. Every measure is a protective measure. We met a Dutchman, Henk Ovinck, who says it's time to rewrite America's disaster playbook entirely. And there's only one opportunity. That is when a disaster hits. It's like an x-ray. It tells you where all your vulnerabilities are and gives you the

opportunity to step up and say, we can do better. Ovinck is the world's only water ambassador, a role given to him by the Dutch government. We need to take action now. He advises the UN, 35 individual countries, and a dozen U.S. cities. He travels the globe like a missionary, preaching the gospel of flood prevention. This is your house. This is my house. One of his latest stops was Houston, still recovering from Hurricane Harvey. So what's the biggest challenge in the United States?

You're solution-oriented. You have a collective. When things happen, you come together. You want to build back and repair and be ready when disastrous things happen. But there's not so much a belief that you can actually prevent a disaster from happening. But how do you go about preventing a disaster like Katrina, Harvey, Sandy? It just doesn't seem possible. We can't prevent them from happening. But the impact that is caused by the disasters, we can decrease by preparing ourselves.

I think the catastrophes we see in the world are all man-made. The storms are perhaps man-caused, and you can debate that. But the catastrophes because of the storms, those are man-made. It's a radical statement. We went with him to the Netherlands to learn what shaped his thinking. It's water. Water is everywhere in this country known for its charming canals, picturesque dikes and windmills. But they're not just quaint tourist attractions. For centuries, the canals and dikes have held back water. The windmills pump it away.

Oving took us up in a helicopter so we could see it from above. From what I can see here, it looks as though the entire country is man-engineered. Yes. We flew over Rotterdam, his hometown, so he could show us how the country has been engineered. How much of this city is below sea level? Almost everything. When was the last time this flooded? This doesn't flood. Because of the precautions you have taken. The Dutch allocate more than a billion dollars a year

to manage their flood infrastructure. Some of it is massive, like the Maaslandkering storm surge barrier. These are the gates. Right. They're big. They're enormous. It's like an Eiffel Tower, like the Paris Eiffel Tower on its sides, but then two. Each one the size of the Eiffel Tower. The gates guard one of the largest ports in the world and most of the Dutch population. They don't have hurricanes like we do, but ferocious storms with hurricane-force winds can blow in from the North Sea and push in huge storm surges. When that happens, the two arms seal off the Rhine River and Rotterdam. The gates took six years to build and cost 500 million dollars. That's a big investment for something that you've only had

to use once or twice since it was built. 150 billion dollars were lost in New Orleans. I don't think I need to say more. How many people were killed? Sandy, another storm, 70 billion dollars. We don't have those emmities. But they did in the past. Your Katrina moment was in... 1953. 1953. Yeah, but 53 was our real wake-up call.

A storm blowing in from over the North Sea, from the West. What happened? It actually swallowed the southwestern part of the Netherlands. The dams, dikes and levees broke and the water flowed in, taking away lives of almost 2,000 people. A lot of families were ripped apart. The Dutch still refer to it as the disaster because they haven't had one since, not a single death from flooding in 65 years. They've learned the lessons of the past well. Dutch engineers calculate how high and strong dikes and dams must be to withstand the

most extreme weather, a one in 10,000 storm. Rotterdam is at the forefront of defensive design. This basketball court can hold 450,000 gallons of storm runoff. This sloping park atop a shopping center is a storm surge barrier. And this world-class rowing facility doubles as a flood reservoir. The Dutch pride themselves on blending form and function. So what is this place? These look like dunes. They are dunes. But I take it this is the Netherlands, so it's not just dunes. No, these are man-made dunes. Hank Oving took us to one of his favorite projects along the North Sea. The beach town of Kotwik was vulnerable until Dutch

engineers created these natural-looking dunes. Many beaches in the U.S. have man-made dunes, but they are nothing like this. And these dunes protect the town from a sea surge or a big storm. Sea surge, storm, and also we incorporate sea level rise of the future. They also integrated urban planning. To unclog Kotwick's streets when tourists flock to the beach, and to raise the height of the dunes to 25 feet above sea level, engineers built a parking garage. Under the dunes.

Under the dunes. Under the dunes. So under this whole stretch, it looks like, I don't know, several football fields. Yes. Under all of this is a parking garage. Almost 700 cars can park here. Could a structure like this have saved New Jersey beach communities from... Sandy? Yes, it could. You might call the Netherlands the storm drain of Europe. Several major rivers empty here. When France and Germany flooded like this two years ago, most of that water ended up in the Netherlands. But towns and cities in Holland weren't inundated, largely because of something the Dutch are doing that defies logic. They are lowering dikes and dams along some rivers.

Rivers are living elements in a landscape, and they become bigger when there's more water and become smaller when there's less. And they need to have that capacity. So you went from flood control to controlled flooding. Yeah. You have to let some places flood so you can keep other places dry? Yeah.

The Dutch call it room for the river. So this is where your old house was? Yeah. Vic Gremer, a social worker in the village of Workendam, personally had to make room for the Meravade River. Hundreds of people like him had to move so their property could be used as floodplains. So the government comes and asked you to leave, did you have a choice? Not really. We had a choice to leave or stay, but on their conditions. The conditions? He could remain in the area, but had to sell the family home to the government.

He used the money to build a new house on higher ground. What did you think of that when they tore your house down? But the old house, there are 25 years of memories. It's really the end of... I don't get emotional. But he said he did it for the greater good, allowing the swollen river to pool in this new floodplain could save thousands of people from flooding downstream in Rotterdam.

The idea of moving people out of the floodplains in the U.S., we'd be talking about millions of people. That would be a really tough sell. You pay for people to be in the most vulnerable places of your country. There's a national flood insurance program that is going bankrupt. You pay disaster bills every year. In the rebuilding, it's costing a lot of money. It's wasted. That waste seems built into our disaster DNA. In the U.S., FEMA deals with natural disasters.

Its primary mission is not to prevent, but to respond. FEMA helps disaster victims build back, usually the same structure in the same place. People's apartments were flooded, people's businesses, our critical infrastructure, all of our substations, so we had no power. Dawn Zimmer was mayor of Hoboken, New Jersey when Hurricane Sandy hit six years ago. She told us the city of 55,000 people right across the Hudson River from Manhattan was almost entirely underwater. In some neighborhoods, 10 feet of water? 10 feet of water, yes. And there was fish in people's apartments. It was waste. It was oil. It was a toxic mix in our city.

She said Hoboken got money from FEMA to put things back pretty much the way they were. But she wanted to rebuild smarter. It doesn't help for me to have a fire station. It's individually protected, but there's water all around it. That fire station won't be able to help anyone in the middle of a storm. It just doesn't make sense. So why can't you just get the money and use it as you see best? That's just not the way it works. She says that's when Hank Ovink entered the picture. Sean Donovan, then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, tapped Ovink for

President Obama's Hurricane Sandy task force. The two came up with an idea for an international design competition to fix what Sandy had destroyed, following the Dutch philosophy, rebuild differently for the future. Ovinck helped convince the federal government to cough up almost a billion dollars for it.

You know, in the US that sounds kind of crazy. Yeah. A billion dollars for a competition to rebuild. Something like that had never been done before. Never been done in this capacity, so they also had to believe my blue eyes and my story, and saying, okay, we believe this young man coming from the Netherlands, let's work with him. A proposal that will protect Hoboken and its neighbors was awarded $230 million of the competition money. A Dutch design team came up with the winning plans, with a Dutch twist.

A storm surge defense disguised as a park with a boathouse. Benches and outdoor seating as barriers to keep the Hudson from drowning the city again. Coming up with the plan was the easy part. Convincing residents to go along was much harder. There were people that were calling out, like, give back the money. So let me get this clear, that even after the devastation of Sandy, people were not convinced that they needed flood protection? People are really concerned for example about their property values. What would the property values of Hoboken be if we're flooded on a

regular basis and our entire city is destroyed? After consulting with the community the plans were amended and most residents got on board. Hoboken plans to break ground next year. It could be the first test for OVINC's vision in the U.S. It's going to move forward, and I'm very confident that when that next storm hits, because it's going to hit, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when, and we will be prepared, and we will be a model to show that this approach can work. It's a choice in the end.

It's a human choice. We can think about that future as an opportunity or close our eyes and do nothing and let it happen to us and see more death and despair, more assets and people lost. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more.

Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Sometimes historic events suck, but what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. This past month, Senator Orrin Hatch asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Google for possible violations of antitrust law and anti-competitive business practices, in part because of this story we aired last May.

His request comes amid a flurry of high-profile congressional hearings on the enormous, largely unchecked power accumulated by tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, and Google over the last two decades. Of the three, Google, which is part of a holding company called Alphabet, is the most powerful, intriguing, and omnipresent in our lives. This is how it came to be. Most people love Google. It's changed our world, insinuated itself in our lives, made itself indispensable. You probably don't even have to type google.com into your computer. It's often the default setting, a competitive advantage Google paid billions of dollars for.

No worry, Google is worth more than three quarters of a trillion dollars right now, and you don't get that big by accident. Since going public in 2004, Google has acquired more than 200 companies, expanding its reach across the Internet. It bought YouTube, the biggest video platform. It bought Android, the operating system that runs 80% of the world's smartphones. And it bought DoubleClick, which distributes much of the world's digital advertising. All of this barely raising an eyebrow with regulators in Washington. Were any of those acquisitions questioned by the antitrust division of the Justice Department?

Some were investigated, but only superficially. The government just really isn't enforcing our antitrust laws, and that's what's happened. None of these acquisitions have been challenged. Gary Reebok is one of the most prominent antitrust lawyers in the country, widely credited with persuading the Justice Department to sue Microsoft back in the 90s, the last major antitrust case against big tech. Now he's battling Google. You think Google's a monopoly? Oh, yes, of course Google's a monopoly. In fact, they're a monopoly in several markets.

They're a monopoly in search. They're a monopoly in search advertising. Those technologies are less than 25 years old, and they seem small compared to the industrial monopolies like railroads and standard oil a century ago. But Reebok says there's nothing small about Google. Google makes the Internet work. The Internet would not be accessible to us without a search engine. And they control it. They control access to it. That's the important part. Google is the gatekeeper for the World Wide Web, for the Internet as we know it.

It's every bit as important today as petroleum was when John D. Rockefeller was monopolizing that. Last year, Google conducted 90% of the world's Internet searches. When billions of people asked trillions of questions, it was Google that provided the answers, using computer algorithms known only to Google. They have this phrase they use, competition is just a click away. They have no competition. Bing, their competition, has 2% of the market. They have 90%. Jonathan Taplin is a digital media expert and director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California.

He says Google's expertise may be technology, but its business is advertising, and its most valuable commodity is highly specialized information about us. It's helped Google control roughly 60% of worldwide advertising revenue on the internet. Taplin says traditional companies can't compete because they don't have the data. They know who you are, where you are, what you just bought, what you might want to buy. And so if I'm an advertiser and I say,

I want 24-year-old women in Nashville, Tennessee, who drive trucks and drink bourbon, I can do that on Google. People tell their search engines things they wouldn't even tell their wives. I mean, it's a very powerful and yet very intimate technology, and that gives the company that controls it a mind-boggling degree of control over our entire society. Google is so dominant in search and search advertising that analysts and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley say

it's extremely difficult for startups to get funding if their business model requires them to compete with Google for ad revenue. Jeremy Stoppelman co-founded Yelp more than a decade ago, a website that collects local reviews on everything from auto mechanics to restaurants nationwide and makes money selling ads. The initial promise of Google was to organize the world's information, and ultimately that manifested itself in you expecting that the top links, the things that it shows at the top of that page, are the best from around the web, the best that the world has to offer. And I can tell you that is not the case. That is not the case anymore. Instead of doing what's best for consumers,

Stoppelman says Google is doing what's best for Google. If I were starting out today, I would have no shot of building Yelp. That opportunity has been closed off by Google and their approach. In what way? Because if you provide great content in one of these categories that is lucrative to Google and seen as potentially threatening, they will snuff you out. What do you mean snuff you out? They will make you disappear. They will bury you. Yelp and countless other sites depend on Google to bring them web traffic, eyeballs for their advertisers. But now Stoppelman says their biggest competitor in the most lucrative

markets is Google. He says it's collecting and bundling its own information on things like shopping and travel and putting it at the very top of the search results, regardless of whether it belongs there on merit. So let's start off with sushi. He showed us how it worked by Googling Sushi San Francisco. All the prime real estate is here. This is where the consumer, their eye focuses. And that's by design. Google wants you to pay attention to their content. All of the information here is owned by Google, from the maps to the reviews.

Stoppelman says if you click on any of these links at the top of the page, you may think you've gone to another website. But in fact, you will still be on Google, seeing what it wants you to see while it collects your personal information and maybe exposes you to Google advertising. If you click anything inside this box, you stay on Google and they make more money. That's right. Google told us it doesn't have anything to do with money. It's about improving its product by making searches quicker and easier for its customers by eliminating the need to click through lots of other sites. Stoppelman says it's about stifling competition,

pushing it down the page where it's less likely to be seen. The advantage, he says, is even more striking if you look at the search results on a smartphone. This is exactly what your phone would look like in the palm of your hand. This is all of Google's own property right here. It takes up the entire screen. How important is that first page? It's not even just the first page.

It's the first few links on the page is the vast majority of where user attention goes and where the traffic flows. So if you're not at the top of the page or the bottom of the first page or on the second page, that's going to affect your business. Yeah, if you're on the second page, forget it. You're not a real business. Yelp, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Expedia, and Yahoo all complained about Google's dominance in what they call this anti-competitive behavior to the Federal Trade Commission, which in 2011 conducted an investigation. According to this confidential memo, parts of which were inadvertently given to the Wall

Street Journal years later, the FTC's Bureau of Competition had recommended that an antitrust lawsuit be filed against Google for some of its business practices. It said Google is in the unique position of being able to make or break any web-based business and has strengthened its monopolies over search and search advertising through anti-competitive means and for stalled competitors and would-be competitors' ability to challenge those monopolies. It specifically cited Google for stealing competitors' content and imposing restrictions on advertisers and other websites that limited their ability to utilize other

search engines. But the recommendations were rejected. It flatly says that Google's conduct was anti-competitive. It flatly says that Google's conduct hurt consumers. I mean, what else would you need to know to vote out a complaint? There it is, written by your own staff, and yet nothing happened. They closed the case. They closed the case. Correct. The FTC's commissioners decided that Google's conduct could be addressed with voluntary improvements to some of its business practices, and that Google's decision to move its own products to the top of the search page could possibly be of benefit to consumers. But Reebok and others who were directly involved in the investigation have long suspected that the

outcome had something to do with Google's political muscle in Washington and its close relationship with the Obama administration. Google spent more money on lobbying last year than any other corporation, employing 25 different firms and helping fund 300 trade associations, think tanks, and other groups, many of which influence policy. They have a seat at the table in every discussion that implicates this issue at all. They know about developments that we never even hear about. So their influence, from my perspective, is very, very difficult to challenge. Until now, the only one taking aggressive action against Google and big tech is Margaret Vestager,

the competition commissioner for the European Union. Vestager has become a thorn in the side of Silicon Valley, fining Facebook $122 million for a merger violation and ordering Ireland to recover $15 billion in taxes owed by Apple. Last year, she levied a $2.7 billion fine against Google for depriving certain competitors of a chance to compete with them. Just as well as I admire some of the innovation by Google over the last decade, well, I want their illegal behavior to stop. And that's what you feel has gone on?

Not only do we feel it, we mean that we can prove it. In researching the case, Vestager says her staff went through 1.7 billion Google search queries and found that Google was manipulating its secret search formulas or algorithms to promote its own products and services and sending its competitors into oblivion. It's very difficult to find the rivals because on average you'd find them only on page four in your search results. And why so far down? Well, because then you don't find them.

I don't know anyone who goes to page four in their search results jokingly saying that this is where you should keep your secrets because no one ever comes there. Do you think this has been deliberate on Google's part? Yes, we think that this is done on purpose. How do they do it? I mean, I think everybody has this idea that Google has this algorithm and they put the best searches right at the top. Well, it is exactly the algorithm that does it,

both the promotion of Google themselves and the demotion of others. So they're rigging the game. Yes, and it is illegal. Google has paid its $2.7 billion fine and is aggressively appealing the decision. But for now, Stoppelman says everyone is still playing by Google's rules. If you're in business, you have to be on Google. Yeah, Google wields enormous power across the industry, and they set the rules. The question is, who's watching Google? Since the story aired in May, the European Union has levied another record fine against Google. This one, $5 billion for anti-competitive practices involving its Android mobile software.

Google declined our request for an interview with one of its top executives. It has also declined to make them available to testify at hearings before Congress. In a written response to our questions, the company denied it was a monopoly in search or search advertising, citing many competitors, including Amazon and Facebook. It says it does not make changes to its algorithm to disadvantage competitors, and that, quote, our responsibility is to deliver the best results possible to our users, not specific placements for sites within our results. We understand that those sites whose ranking falls will be unhappy

and may complain publicly. Tonight we're going to take you into the wild with a remarkable photographer who spent his life on the trail of elusive and endangered animals. His name is Tom Mangelson, and at 72 he still travels to remote and inhospitable places. As we first showed you last spring, what he brings back are some of the most spectacular pictures of wild animals you'll ever see. On most mornings for nearly 50 years, this is what Tom Mangelson has done. He's ventured into the wilderness, camera in hand. Last September in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, he waited in an early autumn snowfall for his subject to appear.

As is often the case, it took quite a while. Over the course of your lifetime, the amount of time you've spent waiting is incalculable, I'm sure. Stupid. Stupid? Yeah. Have you learned anything with all that waiting? You wait long enough, it does pay off. For Mangelson, it usually does. Whether it's a male grizzly bear with battle scars, a cheetah chasing down its prey in Tanzania, or butterflies sipping on the tears of a giant caiman in Brazil, each of Mangelson's photographs tells a story. His images have documented species like mountain gorillas, black rhinos, and jaguars, once dominant, now in danger.

On every continent, in every season, no matter the conditions, Mangelson has painstakingly built a reputation not on personality, but on patience. Do you have patience with people the same way you have patience with animals? No. No? No, I don't. I wish I did. I don't know. I don't... Do you like animals more with animals? No. No? No, I don't. I wish I did. I don't know.

I don't... Do you like animals more than people? Yes. Really? Well, not you. Okay. He especially likes the dangerous kind. In a jungle in India, where it would be deadly to be on foot,

Mangelson climbed onto an elephant's back for this shot of a Bengal tiger, paws red, fresh from a kill. In the Arctic, where temperatures can be 30 degrees below zero, he spent years documenting the behavior of polar bears. He nicknamed this group the Bad Boys of the Arctic. He's captured adult male bears play fighting, a mama bear slyly keeping watch as her cubs roughhouse nearby, and a group of bears trying to survive as their world melts away. People often mistake Mangelson's photographs for paintings, and since the 1970s, he's sold them out of galleries, like this one in Jackson, Wyoming. His photo, Catch of the Day, is often called the most famous wildlife photograph in the world.

It's such an extraordinary image. In this day and age, people would think that this is Photoshop, that you've got a photo of a fish somewhere. I mean, it's so perfect. It was taken in 1988 before Photoshop even existed. People think it's faked. But you don't believe in that, I mean, as a photographer. No, I mean, this is the magic.

This is the moment. This is the decisive moment. And this little tiny space right here I think is so important. This is a quarter of an inch. It's in its mouth, but it hasn't actually made contact yet with its mouth. One nanosecond later. Mangelson shuns the use of digital manipulation. What he sees through his lens is what you get.

And at a time when many photographers build their portfolios by going to game farms like this one to photograph captive animals, Mangelson insists on only documenting them in their natural habitat. Okay, Anderson. Let's see what you find. As we saw when we joined him before dawn outside Jackson Hole. You always get up this early? There's only one way to do it. I just do it every day.

Or be really lucky. He's taking us to a bend he knows on the Snake River. Do you hear the elk? It's a sharp whistle. That's it. That's the sound of the wild deer. He's been here hundreds of times, trying to get the perfect shot of elk crossing the water.

So now it's just a waiting? Yep, waiting. What's the longest you've ever spent in any spot? Not here, but anywhere. 42 days with the cougars. 42 days? I went home at night and slept. And then we'd go back at daybreak.

But you would spend all day there? Yeah. So 12 hours a day? 12 or 14. 12 or 14 hours a day for 42 days? Yeah. Did you get the shot? Finally. This was the the shot? Finally.

This was the shot worth waiting for, the elusive cougar coming out of her den at dusk, taken in 1999. It's among the first photographs to document the life of a wild female cougar. It helped launch a movement to protect the cats against human encroachment. Back at the river, after a three-hour wait... Right between the trees there. There she comes. Wow, that was pretty close.

That was worth the wait. Just kind of extraordinary. We headed back to his office in Jackson to take a look at an amateur's attempt. I think it's beautiful. I think it's gorgeous. Yeah, me too, actually. There's nothing wrong with that one at all. It's great. Is she out of focus?

Maybe slightly. Yeah, let's see. Yeah, not quite. I'm sorry. Mangelson's shot was, of course, in perfect focus. And look at what else he's captured at that same river in fall, summer, and winter.

Mangelson credits his father with his love of the wild. He grew up on the bank of the Platte River in Nebraska, where he was schooled in hunting and fishing. As a teenager in the 1960s, Mangelson earned the title World Champion Goose Caller. No small feat considering this is bird country, home to 400 species, as well as one of the great migrations on Earth. Every spring, half a million sandhill cranes stop on this stretch of the Platte River. They're fattening up on grain before migrating north, as far as Siberia. It is an awesome and ancient ritual. Fossils show cranes have come here for nearly 10 million years. It's a spectacle of sight and sound Mangelson has shared for 17 years with his friend and ally Jane Goodall, whose life work with chimpanzees has revolutionized

our understanding of primates. Today, Goodall and Mangelson team up to raise money and awareness for the protection of cranes as well as chimpanzees and cougars. He's taught me so much about the Platte River and what goes on here and what it was like when he was a boy and how he started off as a hunter because that's what one did and then how gradually he realized he loved these creatures much too much. He couldn't go on being a hunter. And so he hunts with his camera.

Here they come. Lots and lots and lots. Look at the light on those up there. What's amazing is this ancient migration still carries on. I think it's completely amazing. I agree. It gives me hope that nature will manage in spite of us. Oh, look at this. Beautiful, huh? Next year, do you think you could invest in a silent camera one of the qualities that i love about tom is his passion and it's when you have that kind of passion and that kind of commitment that you're more likely to get other people involved because

it we can never win an argument by appealing to people's heads. It's got to be in the heart. And I use the power of storytelling and writing, and Tom uses the power of images. If all artists have a muse, Tom Mangelson's is this 22-year-old female grizzly bear. She doesn't have a proper name, but is known by the research number 399,

a creature from America's wild past when 50,000 grizzlies roamed the lower 48. Less than 2,000 grizzlies remain today. For more than a decade, Mangelson has chronicled every facet of 399's life, emerging from a long winter's nap, swatting magpies away from a meal. He's watched and worried as she's given birth to three sets of triplets and a set of twins. She's nursed, protected, and taught more than a dozen bear cubs. Mangelson's photographs, including this one he dubbed an icon of motherhood, have made 399 the most famous grizzly in the world. What do you think it is about grizzly bears that so captures people's imagination? I think it's the wildness and the rarity.

And you see how intelligent they are. Say 399 will go to the road and she'll look both ways. She'll tell the kids to stay on one side of the road. She'll go across and then she'll talk to them. Okay, you can come across now. Isn't that smart? There's also something about grizzly bears that there's a grace to it, but ferocity is always lurking there.

But I like that idea that we're not at the top of the food chain. In Mangelson's portraits, ferocious grizzlies have personalities too, but sometimes it's easy to miss the details. Notice a leftover piece of grass tucked in the corner of this grizzly's mouth like a toothpick. But it's Mangelson's wide shots that may matter the most. They help people understand animals like 399 can't survive without their habitat. Mangelson took us out to show us why he believes seeing your first grizzly can change your life. It's right there.

It's right there. Okay, so it's really close. It was an adult female grizzly resting just off the road. That's crazy. She's a gorgeous bear. Now you see how she just scratched the back of your ear, just like your dog might? Yeah. Isn't that great?

Now she's scratching her belly. It's so incredible to see. It's amazing. A third of 399's offspring have been killed in interactions with humans, hit by cars, or shot by elk hunters out of fear. Last year, the grizzlies around Yellowstone were removed from the endangered species list. But planned hunts in Wyoming and Idaho are on hold, while a judge decides that the bears should remain protected. There's people here who have

said that they can't wait for a season to open so they can shoot 399, because that would be the biggest prize, the biggest trophy. You've had hunters actually say that to you, that they want to shoot 399, because 399 is so famous. Yeah. Hard, hard to believe. While he worries about what will be lost, Tom Mangelson is determined to show us the beauty and fragility of what still survives. And so he sets out once again, patiently making his way alone into the wild. It's my gift in a way that I can give people, hopefully, to preserve what we have left, preserve wilderness,

preserve species like goosey bears, and make them think about it.