I approach the seafan for a closer look, lured in by its outrageous golden-orange hue. The gaps between the glowing branches are so packed with delicate white, eight-armed polyps that I struggle to comprehend where they can all attach.

Real conservation begins when a place stops being scenery. That realization followed me home from Zion National Park in Utah after a FUJIFILM assignment for a project called “The Great American Road Trip.” I had chosen Zion because I’d only driven through it once before, during the national park closures, and even then, I could feel something in the landscape tugging at me.

Visiting Madagascar is like turning back the clock. It all began over 160 million years ago when the world’s fourth-largest island began to break away from the massive, ancient supercontinent known as Gondwanaland.