Humpback whales in Monterey Bay, California, USA. Global populations are growing after the species was nearly hunted to the brink of extinction, but they are still in danger.
Cristina Mittermeier is a marine biologist, contributing National Geographic photographer, founder of the International League of Conservation Photographers and co-founder of SeaLegacy, a collective of some of today’s most renowned photographers, film-makers and storytellers working on behalf of the world’s oceans. She specializes in conservation issues concerning the ocean and indigenous cultures.
Humpback whales in Monterey Bay, California, USA. Global populations are growing after the species was nearly hunted to the brink of extinction, but they are still in danger.
I’m a conservation photographer and an advocate for the oceans: I am committed to fighting for the future of our planet for the rest of my life.
I grew up in a small city of 120,000 people in a mountain region of Mexico that was very conservative, very Catholic, rich with indigenous people, but wealth was scarce. Both of my parents were professionals so I was part of the middle class, living a sheltered life, attending private schools. And even though I lived next door to those with meager means, I always accepted that that was their fate and didn’t question it. There was an unspoken embarrassment that having any indigenous blood in your veins was something to be ashamed of: the whiter you were, the better off you were and the better your chances to advance. But this wasn’t talked about, especially in Mexico. There is a paralyzing, underlying racism there and I couldn’t see it until many years later when I moved to the United States, which allowed me to look back at my own country with very different eyes.
As children, we tend to live in this little bubble where we’re protected, not imagining that there is a bigger world outside of where we’re born. That was me, growing up in a little city far away from the ocean. As a Mexican girl, even if it’s not necessarily spoken out loud, I knew what was expected of me: to find a husband to take care of me. But I wanted to be an adventurer – to be out in nature, to go to the ocean – but that wasn’t viewed as acceptable for a girl in middle-class Mexican society. I have an older brother and am the oldest of four girls. The unspoken reality in my home was that my brother would have a lot more privileges and opportunities; he was the one that was expected to go and do something amazing, while we girls were taught to knit, crochet, sew and cook. However, my mom championed us, never failing to say, ‘Of course the girls should go to summer camp! They should learn to canoe, to hike and be outdoors.’ I was lucky to have a mother who told me to go and do whatever I wanted to.
Two crabeater seals rest on a bed of ice under the Antarctic sun, framed by overturned icebergs whose surface displays the scars and dimples of a long journey at sea, before arriving in this shallow bay to end their days.
‘Why?’ ‘Why is it that people don’t get it?’ ‘Why are we still having conversations with people that don’t realize that climate change is a real threat?’
My hometown was tropical and lovely and we had a fantastic garden that towered with big trees. My mom is an incredible gardener and she liked to keep a menagerie of animals like chickens, peacocks, parrots, parakeets and lots of dogs and cats and other domesticated animals. I loved reading, so when my father came home with a series of adventure books for my brother that told wild stories of pirates in Malaysia having adventures in the jungle with tigers, sharks and crocodiles, I was jealous. My brother seemed somewhat interested, but I was fascinated! I would take those books (which I still have) and climb to the top of the highest tree to read, losing myself in that world. I devoured the stories told on those pages over and over again. I wanted to live that life of adventure like those pirates in my books were having out at sea, chasing whales and seeing other beautiful creatures, like dolphins. There was a romance about it that made me fall in love with the ocean.
Crossing over a crack in the ice, a polar bear searches for food in the North Pole. Classified as marine mammals, polar bears hunt seals and even whales, from both in and out of the water. Less than two per cent of their pursuits are successful. There are fewer than 25,000 polar bears left and as many as 1,000 are killed every year for both subsistence in indigenous communities and for trophy, which isolated communities rely on as one of their only sources of income.
My dad was from a coastal town in an oil-producing region on the Gulf of Mexico and that’s where my family went to the beach – a truly ugly beach. My mom had to carry gasoline so she could clean the globs of petroleum that stuck to our feet before we headed home at the end of the day. But to me, it was magical. I was five or six years old the first time I went into the ocean alone. A large wave picked me up and rolled me around and when I surfaced, I was hooked. I thought, ‘This is it! This is what I want to do!’ I knew I loved the ocean, but the connection to try to protect nature didn’t come until many years later when I was in university.
As a teenager, I didn’t want to leave home to go to university, so I decided to stay one more year, entering into a major in communications. At the end of that year – one of doing all the right things, dating the right boys, going to the right promotions for the girls (very high society) – I realized I was so bored! My parents had paid for that expensive first year of university and I found myself at a crossroads. I knew that that wasn’t what I wanted to do; I wanted to be a marine biologist, but that wasn’t an acceptable profession for girls in Mexico at the time. My father had the firm idea that I would go to his alma mater university to become an accountant like him. I wanted to go, so we made a compromise: I signed up for biochemical engineering in marine sciences at his university and I moved to the other side of the country.
Naimanngitsoq Kristiansen, a traditional Inuit hunter from the remote village of Qaanaaq in northern Greenland, stares pensively at falling snow. He is one of the last ice hunters of the north, concerned with the consequences of a changing earth on his home and the lives of the people in his community.
As part of my studies, we looked at commercial fisheries and aquaculture in the Gulf of California and part of our studies included going out on industrial fishing boats as observers. I think we all have this idea of how fishing happens – imagining the noble fishermen out at sea – but in reality, the way that fish are caught is rather brutal. The whole experience that an animal goes through when it’s caught in a net is very traumatic. And it wasn’t just the sardines or the tuna or whatever they were meaning to catch, it was all the other animals that were killed at the same time. Everything from sea turtles to dolphins to stingrays to seabirds were callously discarded, thrown back to sea like they had no value, no worth. As a young person, I found it unacceptable. The foundation of life in the ocean is based on the little fishes like sardines, anchovies and herring and the fishermen were scooping them up, almost as if they were mining them. You cannot call that fishing. I had a really hard time fathoming that this is how humans catch tuna; the mighty fish in the nets have no common semblance to the flakes of pink flesh in a tin can. The worst part was there were so many dolphins dying in the tuna nets, but as students, we weren’t allowed to bring the entire carcass of a dolphin back to school to study – we were allowed only to bring the head. Decapitating a beautiful animal to bring its head back to school was just horrific. And while everybody likes a tasty meal of prawns, the way that these shrimp and prawns are fished is also horrific. Nets that are weighted down with big chains are dragged on the bottom of the ocean – it makes as much sense as hunting squirrels in the rainforests with bulldozers! The nets destroy everything as the bottom of the ocean is stripped to catch a handful of shrimp or prawns. Sea turtles, starfish – all the animals – have to die to harvest shrimp so we can eat them. Such a waste.
Knowing that his dogs and his village depend on his aim, Naimanngitsoq Kristiansen waits for harp seals or walrus to appear. His village Qaanaaq is the northernmost human settlement on earth and its food options are very limited. It depends on seals and walrus for food and Naimanngitsoq’s ability to hunt can mean the difference between a meal and hunger.
It was a bit shocking to me that we were not learning at all about how to preserve these resources; we were just learning about how to exploit them. By the time I graduated from university, I knew that I didn’t want to be part of the fisheries community. So it was perfect timing when a hometown friend of mine reached out to let me know his uncle had a hotel in the Yucatan Peninsula that he wanted to turn into an eco-friendly resort. He didn’t know how to do it, but he knew that I loved animals and he also knew that I was looking for a job. He couldn’t pay me, but he would give me room and board in exchange for me making an inventory of the animals that lived on his property. What a job for a young biologist like me! I spent almost a year running around the Yucatan Peninsula, diving every day. I’d ride my bicycle through the jungle on trails, chasing monkeys and would sit for hours making drawings of flowers and butterflies. I made the most beautiful inventory of all the animals I saw and I loved it.
At the end of the year, a hurricane came through. Three months later, a group of scientists stayed at the hotel while they studied how an ecosystem recovers after a hurricane. I offered to take them around and show them all my special secret spots: the mangrove swamp, the coral reef, the seagrass bed and the crocodiles. They were impressed, asking me to take a job in Mexico City at a new organization called Conservation International. That was my first real job in conservation; I was a technical associate for the Marine and Rainforest Project. It gave me my first opportunity to work as a field technician, which also led me to my first interaction with photography when I was recruited to assist Italian-Mexican photographer, Fulvio Eccardi, who was photographing the understory butterflies of the Lacandon Rainforest in Chiapas, Mexico. As I carried his equipment through the jungle and watched him work, I thought, ‘This is what I’d like to do’.
‘This lack of commitment to community, this lack of care for the other, is absolutely at the heart of the environmental issues we are confronted with. Inequality and climate change are the two biggest issues that we’re facing.’
Huskies have been tied to Inuit culture for over 4,000 years. The Inuit people depend on their dogs to do the heavy work of pulling sleds across the Arctic. Here, Peter Aviki, a traditional Inuit hunter from the village of Qaanaaq, organizes his team to embark on a thirty-mile [forty-eight kilometre] hunt across frozen sea ice towards the edge of the ice floe.
A mother orca and her calf are spotted in the northern fjords of Norway. Orcas are not only resilient and intelligent, but they help mould the ecosystem they inhabit and are one of the greatest matriarchal societies in the ocean.
Like so many scientists, I believed that just showing people the data would be enough to make them magically understand – but sadly, that’s not true. People seldom read scientific literature and even though governments are supposed to pay attention to science to guide policy, the truth is, it’s so much more convenient to ignore it and just carry on as usual. I had been part of writing several scientific papers and it’s a time-consuming process: you spend so much time going back and forth with scientists, peer reviewing and then when the article finally comes out, nobody reads it. But at the same time, I was starting to take pictures and when one of my photographs was published in a book, I watched a woman go through the pages, never pausing long enough to read the science. Instead, she went right to the pictures, stopping on a photograph as she wondered aloud, ‘Wow, that’s beautiful. I wonder who this man is?’ It made me realize that if you want to start a conversation with people who may not feel like they have the expertise to engage in a scientific dialogue, you don’t lead with something that’s entirely over their heads. Science is often inaccessible to most people, but photography? A photograph is much more welcoming as an engagement tool; it’s something we all relate to. I remember seeing it so clearly and thinking, ‘Ahh! So it’s not science, it’s photography’. And so I went back to school to learn photography.
One of the most deep-rooted misunderstandings in society today is the relationship between humans and apex predators – be it wolves, killer whales, grizzly bears or sharks. The image of this oceanic whitetip shark was captured in British Columbia, Canada.
How do you become one of the best photographers in the world? It’s not how good you are, it’s who you know. It’s who’s going to open a door for you to become part of a prominent publication or a book project. As a Mexican woman, I’ve often felt invisible, but I used that to my advantage! Over the years, I’ve participated in a lot of events and conferences where people just disregarded me, but I was learning so fast. And at the same time, I was looking at the pictures that everyone else was making and I realized that many photographers were just following each other, going to the same places to take the same image of polar bears, zebras or eagles. Because I had a deeper, scientific understanding of conservation, I knew that the more interesting story wasn’t there. I knew that there were stories around the places where humans and wildlife and nature collide – the places where one can find great harmony and beauty, or great conflict. I knew that for me, that’s where the story was and I could see that few others were telling it. So I thought, ‘I’m going to make my career there’.
‘The money that we have invested in protecting our own planet is really not commensurate with the size of the problem.’
‘When people think about the world coming to an end, the extinction crisis, climate change, they think it’s going to happen to somebody else in some distant future.’
During a family holiday in Tasmania, an island off the south coast of Australia, I started looking at postcards with images by nature photographer Peter Dombrovskis. His images were beautiful and poetic and as we drove across the island, I’d add to my collection of postcards every time we stopped at a gas station. As I learned about his work, I realized that Dombrovskis had changed the fate of Tasmania with his photographs. He worked with a 4x5 field camera that he had to carry out into the wilderness and he never took a photograph closer than two days’ travel from the road. When he learned that the premier of Australia was planning on damming the Gordon and Franklin-Gordon Rivers for hydroelectric power, he realized that the beautiful places where he worked were about to be destroyed. He went into action, lending his photographs to a campaign to save the rivers. He was a timid man, so he was not an activist who would participate in marching and protesting, but his photographs told a very different story than the one the government wanted people to believe. They had said, ‘There is nothing up there; those rivers are just leech-ridden swamps.’ With his quiet, beautiful photographs, Dombrovskis showed his countrymen that these were precious places – and to the world’s surprise, the battle to save the Franklin-Gordon Rivers was won. Not only were the rivers saved, but the area also became a protected wilderness area: the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park. I remember thinking, ‘This is exactly how we can use photographs to make a case for the protection of nature’.
That was a complete epiphany. When I began to take my photography more seriously, I was going to photography conferences, particularly in the US, including the North American Nature Photography Association (NANPA). The topics in the plenary sessions ranged from important things like filters to the latest game farm to the latest camera. And I remember saying, ‘Hey, can we perhaps use our photographs to try to call attention to some of these places?’ And they basically told me to shut up and sit down: ‘You know we don’t do environmental stuff here’. It was then that I decided I would start my own organization. It became an obsession to figure out who the photographers were who were actually doing something with their images and to create a different type of narrative for ourselves. I convened a meeting in Alaska, not expecting much from it, but 200 photographers traveled from all over the world to attend the meeting – and sitting in the front row were Joel Sartore (p. 264), Michael ‘Nick’ Nichols, Frans Lanting (p. 46), Art Wolfe, Tim Laman (p. 194) and Charles ‘Flip’ Nicklin and they were there to talk about how we could change the world with our images. Also in the front row were primatologist Jane Goodall, marine biologist Sylvia Earle, primatologist Russ Mittermeier and conservationist George Schaller, who stood up and said, ‘You guys are better conservationists than most scientists and you haven’t realized it yet.’ And that’s how conservation photography was born.
When I was trying to encapsulate and understand the type of photography that I do, it just didn’t exist; you were either a nature photographer or a cultural photographer. So I invented a new term: ‘conservation photography’. This was in the 1990s and at that time, environmentalism was seen as radical and polarizing, so I wanted to find a term that was more acceptable to conservative audiences; ‘conservation photography’ seemed to have that credibility and respectability. It really became a platform for the photographers who were doing more than just taking pictures of nature – who were making images to actively advocate for the protection of nature – to find a bigger voice for their efforts to protect nature. That was the start of something really big and really scary. I committed to start a non-profit organization, the International League of Conservation Photographers, which became all-consuming to build, but it was necessary. Sitting in NANPA conferences, I remember thinking that all these people take pictures of flowers and they’re called ‘nature photographers,’ and somebody like Nick Nichols, who hiked 1,200 miles [2,000 kilometres] across the rainforest from Cameroon to Gabon following the trails of elephants with the intention of protecting those forests, was also called a ‘nature photographer’. I was frustrated by people thinking that those were the same. People like Nick needed a very different brand.
I try to be artistic, but I’m also very cerebral. So I think about ‘Why?’ ‘Why is it that people don’t get it?’ ‘Why are we still having conversations with people that don’t realize that climate change is a real threat?’ When you look at the amount of money that’s invested in the science, in the policy, it’s all so important, but when you try to raise money for the communications to share the message, the amount of money that we invest – what we spend on environmental work – is miniscule. I say to people, ‘In the US alone, we raise $410 billion a year for charity, for all causes that we care about. Of that, forty per cent goes to religion and then more to education, art, health, humanity – all of which is very important – but only 1.8 per cent goes to this big bucket called “the environment”.4 That includes all of our oceans, all wildlife, climate change, dogs, cats and horses’. The money that we have invested in protecting our own planet is really not commensurate with the size of the problem and the money we have spent communicating the threat to the audiences that need to know is even less. I’ve now made it my life’s mission to communicate the threat. It’s not just about how beautiful it is; it is that we depend on it.
At the moment, there’s a disconnect – that sense of loneliness you might feel in the middle of a big city is remarkable. But when you go and visit an indigenous community, you never feel lonely. Their society and economic systems are very different than ours and depend on collaboration, community and trust; they really depend on each other for survival. But the economic systems that we have built in cities are the opposite: this idea that it’s me, for myself and I have to get ahead and it’s all about making money and it’s all about elbowing aside those who are competing with you. It isolates you. In any indigenous community, the goal is for everybody to be okay. It’s not okay for somebody to become homeless or destitute; community always picks you up. But in the economy that we have built, that’s not the case.
This lack of commitment to community, this lack of care for the other, is absolutely at the heart of the environmental issues we are confronted with. Inequality and climate change are the two biggest issues that we’re facing. At the root of environmental problems is the economic model that we have been led to believe works – the one that says banks and rich people and corporations will make money and then we’re all going to benefit – but that hasn’t been the case. You lose the care for each other when you become part of that economic machine of getting ahead, where you know that nobody’s going to pick you up if you need it; you’re on your own. I sense that young people are afraid of that and of what’s happening to their planet, to their future. The powerlessness is paralyzing. So just like they pour onto the streets to follow Greta Thunberg, I believe if young people pour into the voting booths and we all vote for somebody who cares about the poor and about the environment and about the young, I think we could be okay; we could change things.
‘We have succumbed to the fate that destiny is written and that we cannot change things. But I believe we can.’
A Tamil woman sets out a handful of small fish to dry in the midday Indian sun. The majority of this small catch will go to make chicken feed.
‘Change is such an opportunity. The future that I imagine is one in which humanity realizes the opportunity that we have right now.’
I often tell the story of my first assignment of going to remote villages in the Amazon because the indigenous people who lived there were about to be displaced by a giant hydroelectric dam, the Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River in Pará, Brazil. And as indigenous people, without any education, they only vaguely understood what was about to happen. So I went there to create a portrait of the river and the people, to basically show the government that there were real families and real people living in these communities and they were about to be displaced, their lives changed forever. I spent a lot of time taking pictures of the beautiful body painting they did, of the children, the rainforest and the animals.
A woman shelters in a small hut from the relentless sun in Madagascar’s spiny forest. She wears a traditional mask made of powdered bark which acts as a natural sunblock and mosquito repellent.
There was a moment when there was an opportunity to take a photograph of a woman who was mourning the loss of her child. She had dug up her child’s body from the grave and she was carrying it around and hitting her head with a machete, so she was covered in blood. I could have taken a photograph of her, but I didn’t have the courage. I felt like I was intruding in her life and I was thinking about my own children and how would I feel if somebody photographed me when I was in mourning. And it wasn’t until months later, when the dam was approved, that I thought, ‘Maybe dramatic photos like that would have created the change we needed?’ We’ve seen it happen in the past, when Nick Ut’s photograph of people in Vietnam running away from napalm stopped a war.
Since then, I force myself to make the photograph, even the ones that are uncomfortable, like the photograph of the starving polar bear. Paul Nicklen and I were attacked, threatened and violently criticized for that image. There are dark and scary corners of the Internet that emerged to weigh in on that photograph; it was painful, uncomfortable and very scary to realize the size of the community still denying that climate change is a threat. But I think the biggest lesson for me in all of this has been the guilt I feel when I have failed to act; when I haven’t had the courage to make the photographs or to tell the stories or to be truthful. It is a horrible thing to see that you’ve failed somebody, that you didn’t do enough, that you didn’t stand up, that you didn’t use your voice.
A young Kayapó girl bathes in the warm waters of the Xingú River in the Brazilian Amazon River, Kubenkrajke, Brazil. The image was taken prior to the construction of the Belo Monte dam, a megaproject which, after completion, had significant impact on the forest, river and local communities.
Every time Paul and I post a photograph, we know that certain people are going to be offended or they’re going to feel like we didn’t do enough, or they’re not going to like what we said or did. But all we’re trying to do is build a majority of people who are prepared to say, ‘This is the kind of planet I want to live on and this is what I’m willing to do for it’. It takes a lot of Greta Thunbergs. I may be wrong (and I hope I am), but I do think we’re at a critical moment; we’re at the crossroads and it’s now or never, because the house is on fire. We are there.
I think that when people think about the world coming to an end, the extinction crisis, climate change, they think it’s going to happen to somebody else in some distant future, which is a huge disconnect, but they also think of it as an event, like Armageddon. But it’s not like that at all. What happens is a long time of poverty and suffering and humans becoming the worst version of themselves. It’s already happening; people acting ugly toward each other and that’s a scary, scary thought. To me, one hundred years of hunger, disease and famine is worse than a single cataclysmic event. But it doesn’t scare me for myself; it scares me for young people and for children and it scares me because it’s not fair to animals, wildlife, indigenous people, the poor and women.
Change is such an opportunity. The future that I imagine is one in which humanity realizes the opportunity that we have right now. We already have the technology to shift our entire energy scheme to renewable sources. If we do that, not only will we be saving our planet from this enormous carbon burden, we’ll also create hundreds of thousands – even millions – of jobs for young people to retrofit our economy for a renewable-energy future. And that in itself is really hopeful. We have succumbed to the fate that destiny is written and that we cannot change things. But I believe we can.
