In 1994, inspired by the travels of British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace—a contemporary of Charles Darwin and a 19th-century explorer of the Malay Archipelago—photographer James Whitlow Delano traveled to Malaysia to see the landscape he had read about.

He recalls taking a long boat ride up to the town of Kapit where he met an Iban Dayak man. Delano told the man he wanted to see the virgin forest. He recalls the man’s response: “There is none.” The man continued, “You have to go to the Indonesian side because loggers have gotten all the way to the border.”

A couple of years later Delano returned to test the truth of that statement. “I went in on the Malaysian logging roads almost