Portrait of a grey seal in the waters off Acadia National Park, Maine, USA.
Brian Skerry is a photojournalist, a fellow of the National Geographic Society and a founding member of the International League of Conservation Photographers. Specializing in underwater and marine photography, his work is centred on promoting awareness about the world’s oceans and waterways.
I’m an underwater photographer specialising in marine wildlife and ecosystems in the sea. I’ve been working for National Geographic since 1998 and just began my twenty-eighth story for the magazine. I didn’t start out wanting to be a photographer; I just wanted to be an ocean explorer. I can remember reading National Geographic as a little boy and watching those old documentaries by Jacques-Yves Cousteau and just being absolutely captivated by the notion of exploring the oceans, so my parents would take me to the beaches in New England in Massachusetts, USA, when I was two, three years old. We had a swimming pool in the backyard and when I was about three, I can remember putting on my little mask and fins and swimming in the pool, pretending I was swimming with sharks and whales and dolphins, exploring shipwrecks.
When I was about fifteen years old, I became a certified scuba diver. I just wanted to find a way to explore the ocean. And it was maybe a year or so after that I was attending a dive show – a conference in Boston – and I remember sitting in the audience and watching the photographers and film-makers present their stories about exploring the ocean, but as visual storytellers. And I often describe it as an epiphany; I just had this moment where I remember saying, ‘That’s how I want to explore the ocean, I want to do it with a camera.’ The notion of being able to travel around the world; to go into these places and be close to these animals, make pictures and then be able to share them – that was something that really appealed to me.
A pod of spinner dolphins swims in a coastal bay in the waters off Kona, Hawai’i, USA. These animals forage in deep, offshore water at night, then move into shallower regions to rest and socialize in the morning.
‘With the ocean, fighting climate change is really hard because we’ve removed so many creatures that live there – we’ve killed off ninety per cent of the big fish – the sharks, the tuna, the bill fish – and we kill more than one hundred million sharks every single year. You can’t remove one hundred million apex predators from any ecosystem and expect it to be healthy.’
The first time I strapped on a mask and fins and explored underwater, was in a place near Newport in Rhode Island, a very well-known sailing centre. The water was a bit chilly and not particularly clear; there was decent visibility but it’s not like the tropics. I didn’t feel the cold and was just mesmerized, captivated, by what I was seeing: small fish called cunner [also known as blue perch or sea perch], some crabs walking on the rocks and little snails, sea anemone and other invertebrates. And it’s instantly addicting, the moment you have that experience – at least it was for me – there’s no going back. I had heard that siren call for a very long time, it was this innate desire within me to do those things and once I started, it didn’t disappoint. It was even more than I expected.
I wasn’t sure what I needed to do to become an underwater photographer. I was actually interested in both documentary filmmaking and still photography in those days and still am, but I started by buying an underwater camera. Back in those days there was an amphibious camera that Nikon used to make called the Nikonos and I ended up buying a used Nikonos II, one of their early models. I had no idea how to use it – no idea how to even open it, or turn it on – but I figured it out. I belonged to a diving club back then and I used to go out on weekends on a Zodiac boat that friends owned and we’d go diving in the waters off New England. Those early pictures were horrible; I didn’t have any idea what I was doing, but it was cool – holding the camera and jumping in the water, I felt like I was a photographer.
I eventually decided that if I was going to do this, I needed some training, so I went to university and majored in communications media which allowed me to build a curriculum around photography and photojournalism, television production, film, animation. I learned about lighting, I learned about F-stops and apertures and shutter speeds and all those technical aspects, but always with the intention of using what I learned underwater; so I would take what I was learning and try to do those things underwater. But then when you graduate – you’ve gone to school for four years, it’s gone well, you’ve done well in your classes – but I couldn’t just come out and hang a sign on the door that says I’m an underwater photographer and expect people to hire me. You have to build your own career, you have to create a niche – and that’s what I did. I worked on charter boats in New England. I would do a lot of shipwreck diving; that was something that interested me back then. I loved history – I was always interested in wildlife but there was more opportunity in the shipwreck world – so I linked up with some very experienced divers and I would work on the boat for free. In the wintertime I’d be in the snow, grinding the hull and painting it and doing all kinds of work to pay my dues to get on that boat in the spring and summer for free. We would take people out to dive on German submarines and old World War II shipwrecks. So I became a fairly accomplished diver; I was doing a lot of deep, dark North Atlantic shipwreck diving with many tanks and regulators and dry suits, but was always really fascinated with wildlife and wanting to pivot towards more of that. But it was a long evolution: I sold photos to magazines; I did stories for diving magazines; I wrote a book about shipwreck diving; I did some speaking engagements; all building towards what I really wanted to do.
A school of black margate drift in the water column of Hol Chan Marine Reserve off the coast of Belize. This marine protected area was created in 1987 and has allowed marine life and ecosystems to thrive over the past three decades.
A whale shark glides amongst a school of fish in the turquoise waters off the coast of Mexico. Whale sharks are currently listed as ‘vulnerable’ due to human pollution and hunting. Due to their slow reproductive habits, populations remain unstable.
‘We can no longer treat nature as something we can abuse; we no longer have the luxury of short-term thinking. If we remove a fish from the sea or an animal from the forest, what are the consequences to our own life? It’s about treading lightly. How we can do things better?’
I started out in the mid-eighties and it was about a decade and a half before I got an assignment with National Geographic. It could very easily not have happened. It was always the dream, from an early age when I decided that I wanted to be an underwater photographer – that was the Mount Everest. But there were three underwater photographers working for the magazine and they weren’t looking to move on anytime soon. Ultimately, I became friends with a veteran National Geographic photographer who helped me get that first assignment.
I suppose for most of those early years I saw myself as an underwater photographer and it was probably really only when I started working for National Geographic and had exposure to many other photographers and photojournalists, that I started to think of myself as a photojournalist. Their standards were very high in terms of quality, but they also were looking for people who understood journalism. There are a lot of great photographers in the world, there are a lot of people who could take beautiful pictures, but the magazine needed people who could form a story in their mind and then execute it in the field. I was inspired by terrestrial photographers – the nature photographers, or the social documentary photographers, the street shooters. It was another of those epiphany moments where all of a sudden a light goes on and I thought, ‘Yes! That’s what I need to be doing in the sea.’
Florida manatees swim under a school of mangrove snapper fish in the Weeki Wachee River in northwest Florida, USA. Manatees cannot survive in temperatures colder than sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit [twenty degrees Celsius], so they come into rivers in the winter when ocean waters turn colder.
Underwater photography is quite a different beast than traditional wildlife photography on land – terrestrial photography. I don’t have the luxury of using a telephoto lens, I can’t sit in a camouflaged blind in some remote spot with a tripod and a 600mm lens and wait for weeks on end for some elusive animal to wander by. I can only stay underwater as long as the air supply on my back lasts. Even in the warmest of locations there will be thermal considerations; you will eventually get cold. And even in the places in the world where it’s extremely clear, relatively, you still have to get within a few metres of your subject. It’s a testament to those animals that allow you into their world.
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In the beginning I wanted to do stories about animals or places that interested me. I think in many respects it was self-serving – I wanted to do things that I felt were cool. I had to find the story; there had to be some angle, some narrative to that issue, or that subject, or that species, but it really was just about doing things that I wanted to do. That changed. After a few assignments for National Geographic I began to see problems occurring in the world’s oceans. Now almost all the stories that I do for National Geographic are my ideas, but for the first two or three years I was given assignments. The first one I proposed was a story on harp seals and initially I started out with that same position of just wanting to do something that was interesting to me: going up to the ice in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in north-eastern Canada and helping readers to see a snapshot of the lifecycle of these animals above and below the ice for the few weeks each year that they migrate down from the Arctic and spend time doing courtship, mating and pupping. I thought that would be a really insightful way to go into these animals’ lives and show readers things that they don’t often get to see.
An olive ridley sea turtle entangled in a plastic fishing net in the waters off Sri Lanka. Floating debris, such as drifting logs, often attracts fish and other creatures. In this case, a bamboo log was snagged with plastic netting.
It was during the coverage of that story over two years that I began to realize that there were some big environmental issues that needed to be explored if we were going to do this story right. One was that they continued to be hunted. Most folks had no idea that these cute little white baby seals were still being clubbed by hunters – they thought that had ended thirty years ago. It was the biggest slaughter of marine mammals on the planet, but most folks had no idea it was happening. But the bigger problem for harp seals, as I realized, was the decline of sea ice that was occurring due to climate change. I felt strongly that we needed to cover those issues and I think it was that story that really was a pivotal moment in my life and in my career; I realized that through the magazine I had this platform I could use to reach 50 million people around the world each month.
The reaction to that harp seal story was substantial. The magazine made it a cover story in 2004 and it received quite a bit of attention. I actually became the first journalist in seventeen years to get aboard one of those hunting boats. That hunter had no reason to bring me on that boat; there was nothing in it for him, but I had made friends with him the first season I went out, not knowing, at first, that he was a hunter. I chartered his boat because he was a crab fisherman and I needed a platform to break through the ice and live out there with the seals. Nobody had done that. Previous photographers who had done work with harp seals had used helicopters to go out and could only spend a few hours each day, but I wanted to live out there day and night so I hired a fisherman and it was during that first season that he mentioned that he also hunted seals. The next year he initially said no to me coming on the boat, but then changed his mind. And while of course I had my own opinion of what was happening with the seals, as a journalist I needed to just present the facts and let the readers draw their own conclusions, which they did. And it was because of that story that I began doing other environmental issues.
A harp seal pup, about fourteen days old, makes its first swim in the icy waters of Canada’s Gulf of Saint Lawrence. The survival of this species is threatened due to declining sea ice in the region.
A harp seal pup on the ice in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Canada. These pups require solid ice as a platform in order to be able to nurse from their mothers. Without this stable platform, the pups will die. Thinning ice, due to climate change over the last decade, has resulted in an increased mortality rate for the pups.
The hunting, as far as I know, continues though, in a strange twist of irony, climate change has caused the hunting to decline because there’s less ice, or sometimes no ice, out there. Despite the decline in hunting, the pup mortality rate has increased due to the lack of sea ice. One of the interesting things about harp seals is that the pups have the second fastest weaning in the animal kingdom. [The fastest weaning is the hooded seal, which also lives in that same area that harp seals do.] Harp seals are born completely helpless; they’re born on the ice, but they have almost no insulation – no fat, no blubber – but within two weeks, they have nursed and gotten very chubby. They are known as ‘a fat whitecoat’ at that point and it’s about that time in their life that their mother leaves and they have to go into the water on their own and learn how to fend for themselves. If they happen to fall into the water during those first fourteen days or so, they die. So that’s the problem with the decline of sea ice – those pups need the stable platform of ice from which to nurse from their mother. And I saw that when I was up there; pups five or six days old that still had pieces of the umbilical cord on their bellies, that had fallen through that very thin, slushy ice and the mother was frantically trying to push them back up. I saw some that died and I saw some that made it, but it’s been worse every year since.
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One of the great joys and privileges, of my work is being able to spend time out in nature, often in places that are off the beaten track and pretty remote and to see things that even in my wildest dreams I never imagined that I’d get to see. About a decade ago I did a story about the most endangered species of whale in the world, the North Atlantic right whale. These whales live in my native waters in New England and travel from Canada down to Florida each year, but they are urban whales and they get entangled in fishing gear and hit by ships. It’s believed that pollution is affecting their reproduction, so there’re maybe only four hundred or so of them left on the planet. As part of my story, I wanted to draw a comparison between that beleaguered North Atlantic population by looking at a healthier population of their cousins, the Southern right whales. They’re almost identical in species and can be found in places like Patagonia, Argentina and South Africa, with some in Australia. But I had learned about a population in the Auckland Islands, in the sub-Antarctic of New Zealand, that had only recently been discovered and to my knowledge hadn’t really been photographed and documented before. So I did a very speculative trip for three weeks in the austral winter. We left on a sailboat out of Dunedin and I didn’t know what we would find. I didn’t know if the whales would be there, I didn’t know if the visibility would be good enough to photograph them, or whether they would let me get close if they were there.
We pulled into a place called Enderby Island and it was one of the rare sunny days and the sand was just glowing below our hull and all these right whales came out to meet us. The scientist that I was working with said these whales likely had never seen a human before, so, for the first few days, I was diving alone; I didn’t want to spook them with even one other person in the water. I told my assistant to wait on the boat. And here were these fifty-foot [fifteen-metre] long, seventy-ton [sixty-three-tonne] whales that were extremely curious about me, swimming right up to me and nudging me with their big callosities – which are like barnacles; they could rip your dry suit apart – but it was extraordinary. I couldn’t have imagined an experience like that. Here I was, in this remote corner of the world – I didn’t see another boat for hundreds of miles around – there were yellow-eyed penguins swimming underwater and sea lions, it was spectacular. And here were these beautiful whales. I could only imagine that this was what it was like in my home in New England hundreds of years ago. There are stories of the pilgrims who came over from England and settled in Massachusetts in 1620, being able to walk across Cape Cod Bay on the backs of right whales. Whether that’s true or not, we know there were a lot of them and those whales have now learned to mistrust humans, but here was a group of animals that hadn’t learned to mistrust us yet and were very open and welcoming and friendly. Having an experience like that was just off the scale.
A southern right whale and a diver swim together in the frigid waters of New Zealand’s sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands. These enormous whales can reach lengths of forty-five feet [thirteen metres] and weights of seventy tons [sixty-three metric tonnes].
A southern right whale swims over sandy sea floor in the sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands off the south coast of New Zealand. Its cousin, the North Atlantic right whale, is the most endangered whale on earth. Although the southern right whale is also endangered, it is geographically farther away from industrialization and less likely to be hit by ships or entangled in marine debris, enabling populations to fare better in this region.
A mako shark swims in the waters off New Zealand. Mako sharks are one of the fastest in the sea and have one of the largest brains relative to body size. The number of mako has declined worldwide due to overfishing and the demand for shark fin.
The Southern whales of the Auckland Islands were vastly different from the North Atlantic whale, not morphologically, but from a health standpoint. The researchers that I was working with had a scale of measuring the health index of North Atlantic right whales and it had to do with the amount of fat on their backs and their necks and the amount of scarring from entanglements and so forth. Well, the whales in New Zealand were fat – the scientists didn’t even have a category on their index for a whale that chubby! And they had no entanglement scars – something like eighty-plus per cent of North Atlantic right whales have entanglement scars – but none of these ones did. They were healthy and happy, it seemed and living in this icy wilderness down there in the sub-Antarctic, which was spectacular.
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A thresher shark dead in a gill net in the Sea of Cortez off the coast of Baja California, Mexico. Every year over one hundred million sharks are killed as a result of human activity – often for their fins.
I was not yet a diver when the movie Jaws came out in 1975, but I remember being so fascinated with that movie. I remember seeing the trailers. The night that it was released, I was at the movie theatre and I couldn’t get enough. I wanted to be Matt Hooper [played by Richard Dreyfuss]; I wanted to be that shark biologist. I was probably one of the few people who saw that movie and was attracted to go into the ocean, as opposed to staying away from it! Sure, I was scared, but I was just blown away by the notion of an animal like a great white shark. So that began my interest in sharks. When I started scuba diving in 1977, only a couple of years after Jaws came out, there were very few people who wanted to go in the water with sharks. But the good news is that that has changed; many divers today actually go to great lengths to spend time with sharks. That being said, long before Jaws, sharks have been much maligned. They’ve been given this villainous treatment – so many people out there have this shadowy one-dimensional view of sharks and we only hear about sharks when there is a public safety concern. We think of this creature down there just waiting to bite us the minute we put a toe in the ocean.
For me, sharks represent many things. I see them photographically as an intoxicating subject: they move very elegantly through the water and yet they exude a great confidence. They’re perfectly formed, having been sculpted by hundreds of millions of years of evolution that has made them perfect for whatever environment they happen to live in in the ocean, whether it’s a reef shark or a pelagic shark. They are symmetrical with their pectoral fins and their dorsal fins. What I couldn’t have imagined in those early years was how fragile sharks are. We see them as these big, bad tough guys of the ocean and to some extent of course that’s true – they’re apex predators – but they are also fragile. These are animals that are being destroyed at an alarming rate by humans and I have come to learn that they play an important role in the health of the oceans, so I think they need some good press; sharks need a bit of a makeover.
‘The ocean is dying a death of a thousand cuts and, unlike in the past, we now understand that the ocean is not too big to fail. It absolutely can and our actions are bringing the sea to her knees.’
‘The ocean is becoming acidic. It’s taken in so much carbon that it can’t function as it needs to anymore and it’s changed the chemistry of the ocean.’
Because of my interest in both sharks and in conservation, it was natural to want to do stories that celebrated these animals. I had to do stories that showed the killing of them, sharks in nets and the finning, because we have to understand what’s at stake and what’s really happening out there. But I also recently did four stories about different sharks for National Geographic as a way of celebrating their magnificence, their biology, their morphologies. It was unusual for the magazine to dedicate that much real estate to a single genre of a species like sharks, but I made a case for it and they embraced it because they recognized how important it is. I did stories on tiger sharks, makos, great whites and oceanic whitetips – some of the most dangerous predatory species. And while I think it’s important to do stories about sharks, it’s also just personally satisfying to be in the water with a shark. It’s exhilarating to be in the company of an animal that exquisite.
I’ve had my share of hairy moments with animals like sharks, but I’ve made many hundreds, possibly thousands, of shark dives throughout my life and I’ve probably had only three or four times where I felt unsafe and had to get out of the water. One time I was doing a five-week expedition to a remote series of coral reef islands in the South Pacific. The coral cover in these places was one hundred per cent; in most places in the world you’re lucky to see thirty per cent. The biomass of predators and fish was off the scale, truly like travelling back in time. But the biomass of predators included sharks and there were a lot of sharks around. During one dive with my assistant around sunset, I lost track counting about sixty grey reef sharks that were swirling all around us. I was in a little three-sided coral head and one shark would come in and I would bump him in the nose with my camera housing. Normally that deters them, they would usually just swim away, but these guys were doing a tight three-sixty and coming right back in and behind that one were five more and behind them were maybe ten or twelve more and they were all jockeying for position and I knew that if one latched on, it was going to get ugly, quick. But I was able to move into shallow water and then back to the boat, although they pursued us. So that was one of the times that was a little bit dicey, but honestly I think if you told anybody in the world that you’ve made thousands of shark dives, they’d be looking at your arms and legs and limbs and digits, because they would think you would have had problems. I think it’s a testament to the sharks; they’re not nearly as bad as they’ve been portrayed.
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There’s no question that in terms of issues in the ocean, there are many important things going on. I’ve often said the ocean is dying a death of a thousand cuts and that unlike in the past, we have to understand that the ocean is not too big to fail. It absolutely can and our actions are bringing the sea to her knees. Without a doubt the biggest problem, I think, is climate; there’s too much carbon in our atmosphere. The ocean is the greatest carbon sink on our planet; it takes in carbon and gives us back oxygen. Phytoplankton, coral reefs, all these little creatures that are processing carbon and giving us back oxygen are essential to our kind of life on this planet. But the ocean is becoming acidic. It’s taken in so much carbon that it can’t function as it needs to anymore and it’s changed the chemistry of the ocean – it’s pH is decreasing. Anything with a calcium component is beginning to erode – coral reefs, anything with a shell and even small baseline sources of protein like tetrapods and copepods – all these little creatures are sources of protein for whales and other big animals in the ocean. Climate is the five-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. It is going to dictate everything.
Then there are other big problems. A healthy body, a healthy immune system, can fight off infections if it’s otherwise intact, but with the ocean, fighting climate change is really hard because we’ve removed so many creatures that live there – we’ve killed off ninety per cent of the big fish – the sharks, the tuna, the bill fish – and we kill more than one hundred million sharks every single year. You can’t remove one hundred million apex predators from any ecosystem and expect it to be healthy. We’re also putting eighteen billion pounds of plastic into the ocean every year. I can remember decades ago not really seeing plastic anywhere. Then you began to see it here and there. Now I don’t think I ever go on a trip where I don’t see plastic on the reef, or in the deep ocean, or in a mangrove. It’s inside baby turtles; it’s inside fish in the deepest part of the ocean in Marianas Trench in the western Pacific Ocean – samples of their gut contents contain micro-plastics.
So there are all these problems – but there are also solutions. Companies are embracing circular economies, they’re finding ways to ‘own’ plastic from cradle to grave. Consumers need to demand this and companies need to react. Laws need to be created to help shepherd that new frontier in. One area that can make a difference is in fisheries; we don’t have to fish for wild fish anymore. I did a story for National Geographic about fish farming – aquaculture – and if it’s done right it can be sustainable. We can feed, in the not-too-distant future, nine billion people by fish farming, but it has to be done right and it has to give those wild stocks a break. I photographed carp fishing in China and catfishing in the Mississippi Delta and these seemed to work. You can raise tilapia in an industrial park in a factory using a recirculation facility and we can do integrated multi-trophic aquaculture [a system that provides the byproducts, including waste, from one aquatic species as fertilizer or food for another] where you are raising different species that all work in harmony with one another. These methods don’t impact negatively on the environment and yet they provide a harvestable product that can be sold so that people can make a living and they create good, low-cost sources of protein to feed the world.
So there are solutions, we just have to move away from being hunter-gatherers of the sea and become farmers. That can be a bad thing too if we don’t do it right, so it’s about having an appreciation for our role in the environment; realizing that we wield a very big stick, that unlike any other species, our actions can be devastating. If we’re cognisant of our role and of the consequences of our actions, then I think we can proceed methodically and carefully and make it sustainable for a very long time.
‘Most scientists would argue for forty or fifty per cent of the oceans being protected, but today we’re only at one, or three, per cent.’
Bluefin tuna inside a purse seine [vertical] net in the waters off of Spain. Bluefin tuna continue to grow their whole lives and can cross entire oceans in the course of a year. They are currently listed as endangered due to overfishing.
‘There are solutions, we just have to move away from being hunter-gatherers of the sea and become farmers.’
I certainly don’t know all the answers when it comes to how we proceed, but I do firmly believe that a big part of how we need to do this is to really appreciate our role in the natural world and understand that our actions have direct consequences. We can no longer treat nature as something we can abuse; we no longer have the luxury of short-term thinking. If we remove a fish from the sea or an animal from the forest, what are the consequences to our own life? Every animal on earth plays a vital role at some level, from the tiniest creatures to the largest creatures, so we can’t see things in a vacuum. We can’t just extract all the codfish from a place and think that that’s okay, that somehow they’ll replenish. They won’t and it will affect the overall ecosystem. I’ve often described what I’ve learned about nature in the sea as the gears of a finely-made Swiss watch. They all mesh together and some gears are spinning rapidly and the bigger ones are turning more slowly, but they all play a role. If you begin to remove individual gears, the whole machine breaks down and that’s what has happened in nature. So I think it’s about treading lightly. How we can do things better? We are a very smart species, we are capable of great things, but we have to have the knowledge and the desire to move in the right direction.
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These days in my career I just want to do work that I feel really matters. After that light goes on and you realize that there are a lot of problems occurring in the world’s oceans, things that are probably not evident to most people, you realize that you’ve been given this great privilege: I’m able to go out and document these things and then tell a story about them that can reach a lot of folks. I do want to make a difference and I want to do it for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is my own children. I want them to be able to see a blue-finned tuna; I want them to have a healthy planet.
I feel a great sense of urgency to do this. I think we are living at this very special and pivotal moment in history where, maybe, for the very first time, we actually understand both the problems and the solutions. And the question is, will we do the right thing and work on those solutions, or will we simply bear witness to the destruction? The decisions that we make today are going to determine the future of this planet and the future of our species. I don’t think that’s hyperbole, I don’t think that’s an overstatement. So it’s a time for truth; it’s a time for science and storytelling and journalism to work together collaboratively. The stakes have never been quite so high. I think, ultimately, I’d like to believe that we will do as Cousteau urged a generation ago and that is protect what we love. There is a sense of urgency, but there’s also hope.
I believe there are three pieces of the equation in terms of how change will occur: There is the political scene, the legislative scene, the world leaders; there’s industry and business; and there are everyday folks like us. If we don’t know there’s a problem, we can’t fix it. The first step is admitting you have a problem. If we can’t admit that climate change is real, if we don’t know that we’ve removed ninety per cent of the big fish in the ocean, or that fifty per cent of the coral reefs are gone, then were not going to fix it.
It’s been shown that elected leaders rarely actually lead – instead they follow their constituency, so if there’s an educated constituency that wants to do something good, then political laws will get passed. The first step is taking the science and finding a way to make it interesting and palatable to the masses, because if people understand those problems, then there’s a will from the people. What matters to me is coming up with a narrative that will grab somebody’s attention and help them understand a little bit more about our planet. It’s about wanting to share what you’ve learned. I don’t want to beat people over the head with doom and gloom, but the reality is we have to understand what’s happening on this planet and that our actions have serious consequences.
Back in the 1960s [American inventor] Buckminster Fuller termed the phrase ‘Spaceship Earth’ and the idea that we’re on this planet with no chance of resupply, so whatever we have here, we need to take care of. We haven’t really done that. So I want to do stories that celebrate what still remains, that show why these things matter. We have to understand that, even if you don’t particularly care about sharks, maybe you should care that there are sharks swimming in the ocean, because it’s directly tied to your own life, no matter where you live. If you care about breathing, then you should care about coral reefs and protecting the ocean. That’s the end game: I want people to come away with a better appreciation for the planet, for their connection to it; to see that they are not above or apart from nature, but directly, intricately, tied to it.
A big part of that equation is going to be business: there has to be profitability in sustainability. I do see reasons for hope and some of that comes from businesses and industries who are actually leading, not waiting for governments to lead. I think they acknowledge the fact that that’s probably not going to happen. I have talked to people in the plastic industries and chemical industries who could easily be seen as the bad guys, but I’ve chatted with many of them and they’re not bad people at all; they’re really good people and they have families and they have children and they care about the future and those are the people that we need to engage. I’ve done lectures for companies and corporations who have decided that they’re going to change the way they do things to become a green company. They may not be sure exactly how they’re going to get there, but they set goals and set a mandate. I think that’s where change is going to occur. If solutions are going to be found it’s going to be because some plastic engineer found a new way to do something, because somebody in one of those companies has a reason to want to do it. Villainizing people and making it more tribal isn’t the answer.
I was sitting with an old friend of mine, Dr Bill Ballantine – a great Kiwi [New Zealand] marine biologist who was considered to be the ‘father’ of marine reserves – one night in his home. He said that he believed that if you gathered a reasonable group of people in a room anywhere in the world and you presented them with the facts – in this case, about the ocean – and you told them how important the ocean was to their lives and then you told them that most scientists would argue for forty or fifty per cent of the oceans being protected, but that today we’re only at one, or three, per cent, most people would say, ‘Well, that’s a no-brainer. Of course, let’s protect more of it.’ The problem is that most people don’t know about those things and that’s where we need to get. I think that people do want to be able to do the right thing. Government and industry can help them with that, but they need to desire it first and that’s where journalism and science can help; to give people, consumers, an infrastructure to make good choices.
‘We are a very smart species, we are capable of great things, but we have to have the knowledge and the desire to move in the right direction.’
‘There is a sense of urgency, but there’s also hope.’
I would like to see real traction – serious movement – in terms of protecting this planet. Before I turn that light out for the last time, I’d like to think that we’re on a good track, that most people in the world ‘get it’. There will always be greed, there will always be self-interest, but if the work that all of us are doing, everybody who cares about the planet, to move in that direction, if we can get people to understand how important protecting the planet is to our own life, to our children and grandchildren, to all future generations, if we can protect thirty per cent of nature, especially the ocean, by 2030, I’ll feel pretty good about that. There’s an old proverb that says it is a wise man or a special person that plants a tree knowing that he’ll never benefit from the shade that it casts and that’s what I’m thinking about – I want to see that we’re headed in the right direction.
There are certainly plenty of reasons to be pessimistic and there’s a lot of bad news out there today, but I remain cautiously optimistic about the future. We don’t have a lot of time – the hourglass is running out of sand – but yes, I think we can do it.
A tiny yellow goby welcomes us into its makeshift home – an abandoned aluminium can on the volcanic, sandy bottom of Suruga Bay, Japan.
