- 56 - - 57 -

UnblinkingCONSERVAT ION PHO TOGR A PH ER C R I S T I N A M I T T ER M EI ER

H A S A C L E A R-E Y ED V I E W OF OU R EN V I RON M EN TA L C R I SI S

A N D A H A R D -EDGED S T R AT EG Y FOR A DDR E S SI NG I T

INTERVIEW BY MARY ANNE POTTS

PHOTOS BY CRISTINA MITTERMEIER

- 58 - - 59 -

JEN

NY

NIC

HO

LS

I t was the most shared climate story of 2017. A starving polar bear rummaged for food in a rusty

barrel on Somerset Island in the Canadian Arctic. His ragged fur hung over a painfully angular frame. With sea ice melting in warming oceans, polar bears can’t reach the seals that are their main food source. They spend half their time hunting for food and even in the best of times only catch one or two of every ten seals they stalk. Desperate and hungry, the bears seek calories anywhere they might be able to find them. The video and images sparked outrage around the world, just as photographers Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen intended. They believe weaponizing social media to convert apathy into action is exactly what’s needed to wake people up. “We use photography because it lowers the price of entry into a conversation that matters to all of us,” says Mittermeier, who grew up in Cuernavaca, Mexico and has devoted her life to protecting oceans. She and Nicklen have amassed a collective audience of more than eight million people on social media, and their activist NGO, SeaLegacy, is a seven-million-dollar organization dedicated to using storytelling to effect change. The predicted impact of global warming is often softened by the ambiguous language of speculation or nods to temperature limits and atmospheric carbon in parts per million. Mittermeier has no patience for such equivocation. “People don’t understand that all of that is going to come and knock on our own doors very soon," she says. "The next hundred years are going to be faced with poverty, hunger, warfare, and human conflict. It’s going to be a very unpleasant planet, plus it’s going to be hot.” Like a starving polar bear, it’s hard to look at straight on. But more than ever, that commitment to seeing the world as it is, not how we want it to be, is the first step in setting things right.

You and Paul Nicklen, your partner in life and cofound-er of SeaLegacy, are probably the biggest powerhous-es in conservation photography on social media. Did you grow this huge following intentionally?Yes. “Conservation photography” is a term that I coined and defined. Then I created an organization called the International League of Conservation Photographers [ILCP] to give agency to photographers. And that’s how I met Paul.

But when the ILCP started in 2005, social media didn’t exist. When social media came out, we started posting on Instagram, and nobody had any idea that it was going to become such a big deal. Our first Instagram

post ever was made by Jenny Nichols, who was my assistant. She said, “Yeah, give me your phone, I’m going to do it for you.” And Paul was almost annoyed. He thought, “This is a waste of time.” But he really likes math and numbers. When he started seeing the following grow and then started realizing that certain kinds of pictures have bigger impact, that your captions really matter, and that the purpose you put behind the pictures is what really attracts people to your account, he became obsessed.

In a period of five years, he became the photographer with the largest social media following in the world. And I am the female photographer with the largest social media following. In that sense, we are a powerhouse couple.

Paul originally thought it was a waste of time, but how do you feel about it now?Instagram in particular has become our main business vehicle. All the money that used to be spent on adver-tising in print resources has largely been redirected to social media. Whoever has the bigger account gets a lot of the advertising offers.

Do you feel like you can still pursue your mission even with advertising deals in the mix?The interesting thing is that we have not taken advertising money. The way that we use our social media is actually not for advertising, but for marketing the imperative of protecting our planet. I see our social media as an opportunity to educate our followers every day with a little tidbit of information on how to be a good earth citizen. But also to give our followers agency and the opportunity to be activated and participate in ways that really have measurable impact.

How do you engage those people to create impact?

Mittermeier enjoys a lighter moment with a satanic leaf-tailed

gecko (Uroplatus phantasticus) in Madagascar. The reptile's

fate is linked to preservation of its rainforest habitat. Previous:

Mittermeier photographed this whale shark near Isla Mujeres

in the Mexican Caribbean and shared the image with 1.2

million followers on Instagram. "These gentle creatures play

an important role in bringing both beauty and health to an

ecosystem," she wrote.

- 60 - - 61 -

- 62 - - 63 -

Previous: Paul Nicklen comes face-to-face with a leopard seal

while shooting a National Geographic feature on the impact

of the climate crisis in Antarctica. Loss of sea ice is forcing

the apex predators to congregate near land, where they have

targeted new prey—including fur seals, whose populations

are now in decline. Following: Tourists flock to see pink

whiprays (Himantura fai) like this one in French Polynesia's

Moorea lagoon.

The first realization we had of the power of our social media was when we put up that video and photograph of the starving polar bear. Until then, we’d really just been educating people. And that video went viral. In large measure it was because people reflected their own anxiety and fears over climate change onto that image. It created this series of emotions that rippled around the world. It became the most widely shared video in the history of National Geographic. Also, one of the top ten images of the year in Time magazine. But most importantly, it became the most widely shared climate change story of 2017.

It was very frustrating for us in the end because we thought, what a wasted opportunity that we don’t have a call to action to change what’s happening to this bear. We thought, okay, we have to look for tipping points where you know that there’s something happening that you can activate your followers to push with you. I took a clue from the Arab Spring. It was a Twitter storm that brought Mubarak down. I remember watching TV and thinking, If we can topple a dictator using social media,

can we weaponize it for the environment?

Do you think you can?We have. We have a couple of examples of recent cam-paigns that we’ve done that were very targeted to a po-litical piece of legislation. One of them was the drift nets off the coast of California petition. I knew that Senator [Diane] Feinstein and Senator [Kamala] Harris were go-ing to introduce a bill to try to ban them, but it had been tried many times before over the past thirty years.

One of our dear friends, Rob Stewart, who was making the film Sharkwater Extinction when he died in a diving accident, had been working on this issue of the drift nets. We really wanted to finish his work. Paul got in the water and he filmed the drift nets. These nets are

a thousand feet long, a hundred feet deep. They live in the water twenty-four hours. Anything that happens to swim through, it’s toast. We also planted a mole in one of the fishing boats. He filmed the fishermen as they were killing sharks and dolphins. That ended up being part of the evidence to prosecute them at the federal level for infringement of the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The campaign launched and ten days later we had 120,000 signatures from all over the world.

We printed the signatures and sent a twelve-year-old kid, Charley Peebler, to deliver them by hand. She has an organization called Heirs to Our Oceans and she went in person and she gave a speech. It passed and four months later drift nets were banned at the state level. It’s law.

What are some of the tangible things people can do?It’s a personal audit that you have to do, and it is an ex-istential crisis. For me it has to do a lot with my children, the kind of planet that I want them to live in. One million species are on the verge of extinction. People don’t un-derstand that all of that is going to come and knock on our own doors very soon. The next hundred years are going to be faced with poverty, hunger, warfare, human conflict. There’s going to be a very unpleasant planet, plus it’s going to be hot. People need to know that that’s where we’re going. If it means recycling, then stop buy-ing plastic bottles, or stop eating so much red meat. But more than anything, it really means declaring yourself a citizen of earth.

I asked my audience, “So how much did you donate to an environmental cause today?” And oftentimes it’s like, “Oh, I send fifteen dollars to the Nature Conservancy.” But that shit is not going to get it done. It’s not going to be enough. We all need to make a serious investment into inverting the donation pyramid because our individual actions matter. There’s thousands of environmental organizations tackling all sorts of things. They’re the ones that know how to get to the policy makers.

Through your photography, you present beautiful, pristine places and then the opposite, the dying polar bear. Why the mix?When you’re a student of storytelling, you have to study the better storytellers. I often think that the best speech ever given on this planet was probably by Martin Luther King. Everybody knows how it starts. “I have a dream.”

THE WORLD RESPONDS TO A DYING POLAR BEAR An estimated two and a half billion people viewed the photos and video of a starving polar bear that Cristina

Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen released in December 2017, and their reaction showed how far activists, scientists,

and policymakers still have to go in communicating the realities and perils of climate change.

“We were shocked by the response,” Mittermeier wrote in a follow-up to early coverage. “Many people

expressed gratitude that we’d shined a light on climate change, but others angrily asked why we had not fed the

bear or covered him with blankets or taken him to a vet—none of which would have saved him. Those responses

revealed how disconnected people are from wildlife, ecology, and even geography. And then there were those

who are still bent on maintaining the dangerous status quo by denying the existence of climate change. We

became to them yet another example of environmentalist exaggeration. But they offered us a glimpse of the

daunting number of people we still need to reach.”

Even National Geographic muffed its reporting, claiming, “This is what climate change looks like.” In fact,

there’s no way of knowing what role climate change had in the plight of this individual bear. But global warming

is reducing the extent of sea ice, where polar bears hunt for food. Arctic ice is declining at a rate of almost 13

percent a decade and that decline is accelerating. With such dramatic loss, scientists predict that 30 percent of

the world’s polar bears will be gone by 2050 and the species could be extinct by the end of the century.

- 64 - - 65 -

- 66 - - 67 -

- 68 - - 69 -

But Martin Luther King takes us on a journey in his speech. He says, “I have a dream that one day we will be here.” Right now we’re in the shits down here. But if we work hard, we could be here. I mean, he takes you on this aspirational, hopeful narrative, and he shows you the horrors of where we are today. That’s what we do with our stories, with our photography, try to re-mind people that this is a beautiful planet. It’s a really special place.

It is a really special place.We all love being earth citizens because it’s our home. In Elon Musk’s and Jeff Bezos’s Mars global space journey, they’re probably going to have a briefing for the people who want to go that says, “Hey, when you get to Mars, don’t shit in the water because you may have to drink it later.” We need that type of reminder on this planet. Don’t cut down all the trees because they make the air you breathe.

Can you tell a story of hope?I just came back from French Polynesia. I went with National Geographic and when you go on this big ship with a hundred people and they take you to the highlights, it’s all very beautiful. But after I disembarked I stayed for another week and I went to the island of Moorea. I found this group called Coral Gardeners.

I direct-messaged them on Instagram and they replied immediately because they’re super social savvy. They invited me to visit their office. I get there, they’re twenty years old. All of them native to this island. When they were in high school, they spent all of their time in the ocean...it’s their backyard, it’s their playground. They started realizing it’s dying and the adults around them were not doing anything about it. So they started their own nonprofit organization.

They took a lot of care in their branding, their uniforms with their logo, beautifully designed, and they are so smart in their storytelling and their messaging on social media. They sat me down. Their leader, Titouan Bernicot, said, “Everybody pay attention because this

may be the most important day of our lives.”

I shared with them everything I know about social media and engagement. They were already doing so many things right.

Then they took me out on the water and they showed me how they grow coral. They go and find pieces that are already broken, and then they put it on a piece of bamboo. They have a mesh table in the bottom of the ocean where all these little corals are growing. I picked one, then they took me to a place where we planted it. Then I got a certificate with a longitude and the latitude and the picture of my coral.

That filled me with hope. When I sat down with them, I said, “There are children like you,” because they are children, they cannot even vote yet, “all around the world in Fiji, in the Mexican Caribbean, that are concerned about their own coral backyards and they don’t know what to do. Why don’t we license this idea to these kids so that they can go and take agency?” It’s super exciting.

How do you combat apocalypse fatigue?I think the best way to hope is through action. When you show people that we can win, it’s going to have to be battle by battle, that’s how wars are won. Nobody did a little shake of a magic wand to resolve World War II. It is in the playing field, it is in the front line. You can only counter apathy with hope and with action—and it has to be fun. It has to be a call to adventure. It has to be an invitation to a happier place.

The only way to pull ourselves out of this is we have to wear our invisible spandex superhero suit and declare ourselves for a cause. Declare yourself for a cause. Because once you declare yourself for something, it’s like you get your true north, your compass, your guiding light. This is where you’re going.

Everything you do starts being directed at that. You’re only going to achieve happiness if you align your values and your aspirations with your resources, and those are talent, time, money. I feel like that’s my duty to my home planet. I just direct all of my energy to make sure that it’s as beautiful as it can be, not just for my children but for yours, too.

Titouan Bernicot tends a coral garden in Tahiti. Previous:

Swimming with the fishes in Moorea, and a southern stingray

in the Bahamas.