Sutton Lynch rises most days before the sun, arriving at Atlantic Beach in Amagansett, New York., for the early-morning calm. It’s the same beach he’s been going to since he was a child, and where he worked as a lifeguard for years as a teenager. Now 23, he spends his mornings surveying the horizon. When he spots activity on the water’s surface, he sends out his drone.

Mr. Lynch has earned a devoted following on Instagram for his remarkable footage of marine life off the coast of the East End of Long Island. Alongside images and videos of humpbacks, hammerheads, dolphins, bluefish and many other species, he writes captions that range from childhood memories and research on the effects of fishing policy to explanations of animal behavior. Across the board, his work exudes a reverence for the ocean and the creatures that call it home.

Mr. Lynch’s followers often express surprise that this abundance of species exists just out of sight. The truth is, the resurgence is fairly new. And so the photographer is documenting a dramatic turning point in the East End’s environmental and cultural history — a renewal of sea life after decades of depletion.

As recently as 10 years ago, a whale or dolphin sighting was an uncommon occurrence on the East End. The overfishing of Atlantic menhaden — a keystone species that is essential to a healthy ecosystem — led to a huge drop in marine life off the coast of Long Island in the latter part of the 20th century. (Bony and oily, menhaden are harvested for their nutrient-rich oil and are rarely eaten by humans; they feed on plankton and algae and serve as prey to dozens of larger animals.)

In 2012, in response to menhaden’s numbers having fallen about 90 percent in three decades, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission enacted the first coastwide catch limits on the fish. Populations soon rebounded, improving water quality and bringing more whales, sharks, rays, seals, dolphins and other animals closer to the beach than they’ve been since the middle of the last century.

“It’s very rare that you have a conservation gain that is so visible in such a short time,” said John Gans, a northeast field representative for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. “And it’s 100 percent attributed to the 2012 catch limits put in place on menhaden.”

The return of larger animals that feed on menhaden coincided with Mr. Lynch’s coming-of-age as a photographer. He got his first drone at 17 and began filming from his home shores.

It’s fitting that his career would hinge on a humble fish. In a region, the Hamptons, and on a platform, Instagram, known for exclusivity and superficiality, Mr. Lynch’s work is both accessible and authentic. “There’s nothing pretentious about him,” said Victoria Cooper, an Amagansett resident and a professed superfan, while visiting one of his photography sales this summer. “You can get caught up in being out here; there’s lots of parties and things. I love that Sutton is taking a deeper look behind the scenes of the nature that we’re all part of.”

Long Island is particularly vulnerable to global warming, owing to its susceptibility to sea-level rise, the increasing frequency and intensity of storms, and the growing incidence of algal blooms, among other phenomena. (The region recently appeared near the top of a list by Moody’s Analytics of U.S. metro areas that will be worst hit by climate change.)

Mr. Lynch is partly motivated by documenting those changes. Some complex combination of frustration and conviction characterizes his — and much of Gen Z’s — attitude. “It’s hard for older generations to understand how we feel,” he said. “My parents’ generation often says, ‘You guys are going to fix this,’” he continued. “But they’re the ones in control, and everything needs to be done now.”

But he also sees his art as a kind of longitudinal study of a seascape — a way to track the subtler, and in his view more insidious, changes that happen over years, increments that add up to a transformed ecosystem. If his practice continues for a decade, he said, he’ll have compiled a sizable portfolio of visual information. “Ideally I would love to work with scientists who could study that data,” he said.

Mr. Lynch’s fan base includes not just environmentalists but also artists and fishermen, locals and out-of-towners. “Nobody likes being told what to think,” Mr. Lynch reflected, when asked how he approached the educational aspect of his work. “I don’t want to alienate any of my followers. I just want to give them the facts.” Wary of scare tactics or blame, he chooses instead to appeal to people’s shared admiration for their landscape. “Fear is not helpful, in my opinion,” he said.

And while the recent uptick in shark activity may be cause for concern among beachgoers trying to enjoy a Hamptons getaway, to Mr. Lynch it’s a thrill. In July, after filming spinner sharks, he wrote: “They’re wild animals, and the ocean is their home. They certainly can be frightening, but it’s important to remember that humans pose a much greater threat to them than they do to us.” A great white sighting is at the top of his bucket list. And the East Hampton lifeguards who count on his shark patrol — the city pays him hourly to look for the animals while he’s perusing the coast with his drone — will certainly be grateful for the report if he ever spots one.

Arthur Kopelman, an ecologist and the president of the Coastal Research and Education Society of Long Island, reflected on the value of public environmental education. “It’s critically important,” Dr. Kopelman said, adding that knowledge about their surroundings helps people “become active stakeholders in terms of protecting their coastal ecosystems.” Mr. Lynch is part of that effort, bringing us close to the action and urging his followers to share in his admiration for nature.

Against a backdrop of the stereotypical opulence and excess of the Hamptons, Mr. Lynch’s work is a refreshing reminder of why the New York elite started visiting these now-iconic shores in the first place. Celebrities, tycoons and tenacious weekenders aren’t the only ones flocking to the endless miles of sandy beaches and rolling dunes — a growing society of sea life makes its home here, too, just offshore.

“They don’t even taste the ice cream,” Jessica Yang said of the social-media-conscious crowd that descended this summer on Folderol, a natural wine bar and artisanal ice cream parlor in Paris that she owns and operates with her husband, Robert Compagnon. “They just let it pool into a bowl of melting liquid and die in the sun.”

In late April, a daily line began to form outside Folderol’s red storefront as the business grew in popularity, thanks in large part to TikTok. As the spring bloomed into a summer that saw a record number of tourists traveling to Europe, the lines became longer.

Throughout June and July, tourists and content creators flocked to Folderol, waiting for hours on its otherwise quiet 11th arrondissement street so that they, too, could recreate what they had seen online: fashionable folk sitting on Parisian curbs, eating ice cream from steel coupes, smoking cigarettes and swigging wine.

Both 37-year-old chefs, Ms. Yang and Mr. Compagnon met in Paris in 2010 while working in the kitchen of the highly acclaimed restaurant Guy Savoy. Mr. Compagnon, who is French American, and Ms. Yang, who is Taiwanese American, spent the next few years between Paris and New York City, working at restaurants including Le Jules Verne, Momofuku Ko, Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare and Per Se.

The couple opened Folderol in December 2020, one door down from their intimate Michelin-star-winning restaurant, Le Rigmarole. As new parents, they were inspired to start a family friendly business. “We wanted it to be a place where parents and kids could go and have fun,” Ms. Yang said about their hopes for Folderol. “Parents could have a glass of wine; kids could have some ice cream.”

Because of coronavirus restrictions, when Folderol opened, it was takeout-only. Customers would pick up a bottle from the bar’s curated selection of small-batch natural wines or a pint of seasonally inspired ice cream, hand-churned by Ms. Yang in a labor-intensive, 48-hour process.

As the pandemic eased, customers were allowed inside Folderol, but given its limited indoor seating and the al fresco dining culture of Paris, many patrons chose to eat and drink outside. This gave rise to Folderol’s curbside aesthetic, which garnered mass appeal on TikTok.

“So I keep seeing people post photos and videos from this place in Paris called Folderol, and I’ve honestly never felt like I needed to go someplace more than I do right now,” Anna Hyclak, a 35-year-old American living in London, said in a TikTok video in June. “Spiritually, it is calling to me. Like, I feel like it would cure my depression to sit on these sidewalks.”

Ms. Hyclak’s reel garnered over 20,000 likes and 167 comments, most lamenting Folderol’s viral fame. One TikTok user wrote: “I live really close to this place and it’s totally impossible to go now. The line is huge and full of teenagers/TikTokers at all times.” Another commented: “I went and it felt like a photo shoot set. Like I’m sure it was amazing before but now it’s all the fashion girlies going there for content.”

Many of Folderol’s longtime customers were put off by the crowd. “Last summer I used to come in all the time,” said Samantha Luevano, a 27-year-old copywriter in Paris. “I used to sit outside and eat my ice cream and drink wine casually. There’d be like five people here.” This summer, Ms. Luevano chose to pick up pints of ice cream and bottles of wine at Folderol instead of dining in because, she said, the hectic atmosphere caused her “anxiety.”

Mr. Compagnon likened the situation to “running a marathon in flip flops.” Their small operation struggled to keep up with demand. Frustrated clients started leaving the business negative reviews. The pretty ice cream coupes, which the owners found at Parisian flea markets, began to go missing. On four occasions, neighbors called the police about the crowd.

“We wanted our reputation to be based on the quality of the food and what we produce,” Mr. Compagnon said. “We didn’t see this coming.”

In late May, Ms. Yang and Mr. Compagnon began instituting a series of measures, which they call “roadblocks,” in an attempt to regain control of Folderol.

First, they decreased the number of wine glasses they had available to put a cap on the number of customers they could serve at once. Then they hired a bouncer to help their staff with crowd control. Next, they put up signs to the right of Folderol’s front door that read, in English: “No TikTok” and “Be here to have fun, not to take pictures.”

In July, they banned guests from sitting outside entirely — an unpopular measure with those who had come just to pose. “‘Oh, we can’t sit outside and take pictures?’” Mr. Compagnon said, imitating customers who were not aware of Folderol’s new rules. “And so they just leave.”

While Folderol was on its annual August break, the pop star Dua Lipa named Folderol as one of her “favorite French restaurants” in a Vogue France video. Despite Ms. Lipa’s shout-out, the atmosphere was noticeably calmer when Folderol reopened on August 30. “We’re feeling better,” Mr. Compagnon said. “People seem to be much more understanding.”

Bianca de la Luna, a 25-year-old model from Germany, visited Folderol the day it reopened. After admitting that she had learned about Folderol on TikTok, Ms. de la Luna whispered, “I don’t want to say that too loud in here.”

“I’d love to take the Instagram picture with the ice cream and wine,” said her friend Huy Nguyen, an 18-year-old art student. “But now it’s forbidden.”

Venice will not be included on UNESCO’s list of “World Heritage in Danger” after a panel voted on Thursday to reject the recommendation of experts at the agency who had raised concerns that Italy had not done enough to protect the fragile city, which is threatened by climate change, mass tourism and development.

Still, representatives of countries upholding the World Heritage Convention, which seeks to protect and preserve cultural sites, said in a statement that “further progress still needs to be made” to properly conserve Venice. During a debate on Thursday afternoon at a World Heritage Committee session in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, several delegates said Italy should host a new advisory mission in Venice in the coming months to monitor the efficacy of the measures that Italy has taken so far and to make suggestions.

“Venice is not at risk,” Mayor Luigi Brugnaro wrote on social media Thursday evening, describing the result as a “great victory.” Posting on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, he added: “The world has understood all the work we have done to save our city.”

Italy was warned in July that Venice, a World Heritage Site since 1987, was being considered for UNESCO’s “in danger” list, even though the state and city have made significant changes to try to protect Venice.

Large cruise ships have been banned from entering Venetian waters. Massive barriers at the mouths of the lagoon hold seawater at bay and stop high tides from flooding the city. And officials have begun tracking tourists via their cellphone data to monitor their movements.

This week, City Council voted that, starting next year, day-trippers to Venice will be expected to pay 5 euros on days when the city is extremely crowded with tourists. City officials hope that the measure will curb some of the millions of tourists who throng to the city each year — five million so far in 2023. Those who stay overnight won’t be charged.

Venice almost made the danger list in 2021, but then, too, member countries rejected the proposal.

Despite the changes in Venice, UNESCO experts who have been closely monitoring the city felt that Italy and the local government had not done enough. Once a site is placed on the danger list, it can lose its World Heritage status, which acknowledges its outstanding universal value.

But the 21 member states thought Italy’s efforts were to be commended, and several said that it was “premature” to put Venice on the list. Several pointed out that climate change was a global issue, affecting many cultural heritage sites, and said Italy should not be singled out.

Some citizen groups had hoped that the city would be recognized as endangered. Nearly 5,000 people signed a petition addressed to the UNESCO general director, Audrey Azoulay, on Change.org, asking that Venice be on the list, because of the problems caused by excessive tourism. “The out-of-control tourism machine makes big financial gains for few, against the common good and those who want to live in the city,” the petition said.

In his report to the session on Thursday, Nicholas Clarke, an expert with the International Council on Monuments and Sites, which advises UNESCO on World Heritage sites and had urged putting Venice on the list, said that efforts to tackle heavy tourism “come very late and more urgent action is required.”

For years, visitors to Venice have easily outnumbered the residents of the historic city center, the number of which dropped a year ago to under 50,000 from nearly 175,000 in 1951.

Speaking before the vote Thursday, Berta de Sancristobal of the UNESCO World Heritage Center, which had called for the city to be listed as in danger, cited “the negative impacts of mass tourism reflected in the continued decline in local residents, leading to the alteration of the spirit of place and the loss of historic authenticity.”

Last week, a local group announced that the number of beds for visitors had surpassed those for residents.

The aim of the UNESCO list, which includes 55 endangered sites like the Old City of Jerusalem and Timbuktu, is to spur conservation, according to the agency. When a site is on the list, the United Nations commits to develop a corrective plan alongside national authorities and to monitor the results.

Matteo Secchi of the citizens’ group Venessia.com said that locals did not need UNESCO to tell them what was wrong with the city, even though a spotlight on the problems was welcome if it made the world take notice.

“We are only trying to carry on our culture, our life, and we see that it’s in danger. That’s why we get mad, why we make appeals to the world,” he said, adding of the tourists: “They’re not happy, we’re not happy, everyone isn’t happy.”

It was near midnight, in a storm, on a dirt road in the middle of Mongolia. Still, the river seemed manageable.

My cousin Cole Paullin and I were searching for a place to camp, and I was exhausted from a long day of fording streams in our rented four-by-four truck.

“Seems fine,” I said. “Go for it.”

Cole accelerated and the front tires plunged off an unseen embankment, slamming onto the rocks below. We were perched at a precarious angle, and the front half of the truck was submerged. Water intruded through a crack in the door, lapping onto my feet. I imagined our rental deposit draining downstream.

Drawn by the noise, two young men came over from a nearby tent camp. One waded toward the car into the waist-deep water with a message typed on Google Translate: “This is dangerous.” I was too embarrassed to be scared.

I lent him my rain jacket as he made some calls. Thankfully, there was cellular service. Within an hour, a man with a truck and a tow strap arrived. We reversed at full speed while he accelerated, extricating us from the river.

“That was Disneyland, dude,” said Cole, 27, channeling the slang of his native Los Angeles. “What a ride.”

Cole and I live on different continents — he’s in Philadelphia and I’m in London — but once a year, we convene somewhere new for an outdoors trip. This year, we decided to take a weeklong drive across Mongolia.

Over the past decade, millennials like me — those born between roughly 1981 and 1996 — have been seeking out remote places like Mongolia, while other tourists crowd Santorini, the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum. It may be a reaction to a world that’s increasingly condensed into our phones, where the same few destinations pop up again and again on Instagram grids and travel blogs. What we have gained in accessibility, we have lost in serendipity.

The Mongolian government has been trying to capitalize on this desire for less curated travel. It has invested in a digital marketing campaign targeting people ages 23 to 40. It has also invited social media influencers to come to Mongolia and post videos of the country’s verdant valleys, Caribbean-blue lakes and orange sand dunes. According to a 2019 survey cited by Mongolia’s tourism ministry, 49 percent of visitors to the country were under 40.

Tour operators are catering to this growing interest, helping young people see the Golden Eagle Festival, an annual gathering of nomadic hunters — male and female — and their eagles; join the Mongol Rally, a driving odyssey across Europe and Asia; or ride in the Mongol Derby, a roughly 600-mile horse race.

“The world is getting smaller, and everyone’s looking for the new frontier,” said Sangjay Choegyal, a 36-year-old living in Bali who has visited Mongolia eight times. “The next place is Mongolia.”

A magnet for adventure seekers

When Cole and I arrived in Ulaanbaatar, the capital, in late July, the line for foreign arrivals crowded the new immigration hall at the airport.

Olivia Hankel, a 25-year-old woman from Oregon, had come to train for the Mongol Derby. Willie Freimuth, a 28-year-old paleontology student from North Carolina, had returned for a second year to study fossils. And Mr. Choegyal had flown in with friends for a road trip to the Orkhon Valley, a lush expanse of central Mongolia.

“When you talk about a trip to Mongolia, it always fills up pretty quick,” Mr. Choegyal said.

Last year, Mongolia had nearly 250,000 visitors, more than six times as many as the year before, when the country was emerging from pandemic isolation. The majority of those visitors were from nearby countries, including Russia, South Korea and Kazakhstan. But the number of visitors from Europe and the United States rose more than 500 percent between 2021 and 2022.

“I think you can have a much more interesting, transformative and engaging experience in a Mongolian outhouse than you can at the Taj Mahal,” said Tom Morgan, the founder of the Adventurists, a company that hosts extreme trips in the country. And, he advised, “It’s better not to plan.”

A tent with four tires

Cole and I hadn’t planned much. We arrived with only our backpacks and a rental car booking from Sixt — one we weren’t sure was real. Sixt’s Mongolian offices operate by bank transfer, and before we arrived, we had sent more than $2,000 to their account. I worried it could be a scam.

We were relieved when we arrived at Sixt and found it had our booking. Then we got the bad news: A previous group had wrecked the S.U.V. we had requested. A 3,000-mile trip on the country’s many dirt tracks had destroyed the bottom of the car. The agent offered us a Russian-made UAZ pickup truck equipped with a rooftop tent. It didn’t have a stereo and the air-conditioning was a faint stream of hot air, but it was sturdy.

We were lucky to get it. Sixt was almost fully booked — as were other providers in the city.

“We sold out three times this season. So we added more dates,” Max Muench, 31, a co-founder of the travel company Follow the Tracks, said. His company, which started running tours last year, helps clients book cars and gives them tablets loaded with maps they can use to navigate while offline. “Especially now after Covid, people want to feel a sense of freedom again,” he said. “And they’re looking for it in the vast emptiness of Mongolia.”

Nomads guided by Google Maps

We soon discovered what that emptiness looked like.

Roughly half of the country’s more than 3.2 million people live in the overcrowded capital, a tangle of roads and new high-rises fraying in every direction. But around a quarter of Mongolia remains nomadic, living on the edgeless steppe in gers, round tents made of wood, tarp, and animal skins or fabric. They move with their herds as many as four times a year.

As we drove out of the city, guided by Google Maps, the sky stretched so wide the horizon seemed to curve. A herd of horses gnawed at the grass, swishing their tails at flies. We were seeking out the herd’s distant relatives as we aimed the truck toward Hustai National Park, a refuge for what the Smithsonian calls the last truly wild horses left in the world.

After nearly an hour on a dirt road, we pulled up to a small, dusty entrance gate. I asked the national park manager, Batzaya Batchuluun, if visitors ever had a hard time finding the place. “Most people come with a guide. But young people like you are starting to show up on their own,” he said. “They have phones. They get here eventually.”

Mongolia is surprisingly connected. Despite the long stretches between villages, we got cellular internet service on much of our drive (using a Mongolian SIM card). One day as I was watching camels in the desert, I was even able to do something absurd: Try my luck with Ticketmaster for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour tickets. (Like so many others, I was disappointed.)

The Mongolian government has been working to expand online access to citizens and tourists. An estimated 84 percent of the country has access to the internet, and gers often have solar panels, keeping each family’s cellphones charged. The government has also been working to pave the roads from Ulaanbaatar to popular destinations.

All that development has allowed young travelers to roam the country more freely, bringing a different kind of nomad to the steppe. The day after our visit to the wild horses, as we explored Genghis Khan’s ancient capital, Karakorum, we met a group of European women, friends from college on a two-week road trip. They, too, chose to eschew a guide and navigate with their phones.

“We didn’t want a trip where everything is organized for you,” Maria Galí Reniu, a 31-year-old from Spain, said. Hanna Winkler, a 30-year-old from Austria, chimed in: “On our own, we can just pull off anywhere we decide is a nice camp spot.”

A horse race and a hailstorm

Cole and I also pulled off where we liked. At night, we camped under the Milky Way, arching bright above our rooftop tent. During the day, we made lunch in golden canola fields or next to winding rivers. In Elsen Tasarkhai, a long stretch of sand known as the mini-Gobi Desert, we rode two-humped Bactrian camels.

Halfway through our trip, I persuaded Cole to detour to Tsenkher hot springs, a popular destination for Mongolians. Nearly an hour down a dirt road, we came across a crowd of children, bobbing on horses. Drawing closer, we saw they had numbers pinned to their shirts.

One girl and 41 boys, ages 8 and up, gathered for a race. The families used their cars and motorcycles to herd the horses to the starting line. Parents smiled and motioned for us to follow as they lined up their cars next to the horses. When the horses took off, we did too, speeding across the grass alongside the racers at nearly 50 miles per hour.

Just as the first horse crossed the finish line, it began to hail. What would have been a celebration turned into an exodus. Some of the riders crossed the finish line and then headed straight into the hills, braving pellets of ice.

As we drove on toward the hot springs, torrential rain overpowered the windshield wipers, and we began to slide. We passed Priuses, a favorite car in Mongolia, mired on the roadsides. Each time we forded a swollen river, the water rose closer to the cab, until we got stuck and it finally leaked in.

The storm had also flooded the hot springs. As we shivered in a tepid pool, one English-speaking boy commiserated: “Sorry you missed the hot water.”

Along came a spider

After days of slow, off-road driving, we finally arrived at sparkling blue Khuvsgul Lake — our final destination. We wanted to spend the night in a ger, so we called Erdenesukh Tserendash, a 43-year-old horse herder who goes by the nickname Umbaa. His number was on Facebook.

Umbaa, his wife and two sons welcomed us into one of his family’s tents, lit by bulbs hooked to car batteries. For dinner, the family served boiled sheep and horse meat on a communal tray with carrots and potatoes. After dinner, they cracked open the bones and sucked out the marrow, and before bed, we sipped tea with yak milk. As I lay there scrolling, in the light of my phone, I noticed something on my face and swatted. It was a spider the size of a quarter.

The next day, Umbaa took us on a full-day horse ride. We cantered across meadows of wildflowers, saw reindeer and climbed a mountain overlooking the lake, lazing in the sun for lunch, an idyllic finale to our journey.

Back in Ulaanbaatar, the wildflowers seemed far away as I stood with the Sixt agent and worried about the truck. Was there any damage from getting stuck in the river? The truck was so covered in mud and dust, it was hard to tell.

I thought back to the wrecked S.U.V. we were originally supposed to rent and braced myself to lose our deposit, more than $1,400. The agent waved away my fears. Everything was fine, he said. Getting stuck was just standard driving in Mongolia.

His shift was over, so he offered us a ride to the airport. We thought we had plenty of time to make it, but the grinding traffic in Ulaanbaatar almost made us miss our flight. It was one last reminder that in Mongolia, little goes as planned.

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