This week on the In Depth podcast, renowned wildlife
photographer Paul Nicklin. I always say it a perfect image
is art, science and conservation, and you don't even
know why you're in love at that moment, but you just got sucked
into that world. In this 2018 interview, Nicklin
shared that he had initially pursued a career in science
before realizing that only photography could fulfill his
passion for animals in their habitats.
To witness that and want to photograph it versus turning
that into a couple data points on a sheet of paper, you know,
one didn't feed my soul and the other one did.
He uses his art to preserve species and bring awareness to
the effects of climate change. Science isn't getting it done,
you know, and we need to break down the walls of apathy, and
that's going to happen through visual storytelling.
Putting himself at risk in the process.
I mean, if I die doing what I love doing then then so be it.
And making the personal sacrifices he feels necessary to
pursue his conservation mission. It's still sort of haunts me to
this day that I don't have that. I'll never have that.
But first, Nicklin's unique childhood on Baffin Island.
All right, so I wanted to start by taking you back to when you
were growing up. What do you like doing when you
were a kid? I had two things.
I mean, I was, I've all my life, I've been in love with nature
and being outside and being outdoors.
So I was fortunate that my family were both Saskatchewan
farmers and the, the southern part of Saskatchewan.
So during the summer months, we'd always be on the farms, you
know, hanging out with all the animals and, you know,
livestock. But still, it's just out in
these big fields with animals. And then, yeah.
And then from there, when I was four years old, my family moved
from southern Saskatchewan to up to the High Arctic to Baffin
Island. And how was that?
It was amazing. And if you don't know where
Baffin Island is, you get on an airplane in Chicago and you fly
straight N for 3 1/2 hours and you land on this island that's
windswept with no trees, that's icy and cold.
And it's the barren lands and the views are great because
there's nothing to block it. You know, you just could see
forever in every direction and it was an amazing experience
that I look back on. And you can remember that even
though you were only four when you moved there.
I do remember it. It's funny because I think it
was just such a big shift in life, you know, to to end U in
something that was so new. I feel it was deeply ingrained
into my brain and my heart right from right from a young age.
What about what you were able to do there differed from
Saskatchewan? I mean, normally when you grow
up in anywhere in the world nowadays, you just don't let
your kids go out and play all night.
And you know, when we were as soon as we were there by sis say
I'm five years old now and then we would be out playing all
night under the 24 hours of sunlight or not maybe.
OK, so let me correct that. So when I was, we didn't have 24
hours of sunlight, but we had as a kid to be out playing with 24
hours of light where you can see all night, you know, and, and to
be your parents wouldn't worry about you because there was no
real major threat or concern, you know, in a community like
that, everybody took care of everybody.
And so you could be out as long as you one did without mom and
dad yelling for you. Yeah, I mean mostly.
I mean, there's two phases to my life.
You know, living in at Cal, it was one thing that was a bigger
city. It had sort of more threats that
you get with a city with a population of, you know,
bringing in drugs and booze and all those problems that start to
come into a community like that. But when we moved to another
tiny community called Kimberhood, when we moved there,
it was Lake Harbor. My mom was a school teacher.
My dad was a settlement manager at the time, heavy duty mechanic
as well. It really was the true sense of
the word community where it was rude to knock on anyone's door.
Back then, you'd never knocked on anyone's door if you wanted
to go into their house. It was, it's, it's such an open
door policy that you would just walk into any home any time of
day, really. Yeah, you would just walk into
any room. There would often be a seal
carcass in the middle of the the kitchen floor or a Caribou
carcass, or there'd be soup in on the on the stove.
And you would just, if you're hungry, you would eat, you would
talk or you would relax and you'd go back outside and keep
playing. And if you wanted to go carve
soapstone, you would go into someone's carving shed and you
would carve up some soapstone. I mean, it was just just a
really beautiful sharing community.
So when you're 7, you moved to this community that has less
than 200 people. In addition to what you just
mentioned, just describe what the environment was like there.
It was, it was incredible, like when we lived in a callow at
Lake Frobisher Bay, the the community was a probably was
maybe 2000 people at the time. I can't remember the exact
number, but you know, it's probably 3040% white people back
then. And you know, so it had sort of
the, the tension between the cultures and it was just a chat,
a town that was changing. But when you move to all of a
sudden to Lake Harbor, Kimmelwood, it was a town that
was still very set in its traditional ways.
We never had a telephone. We never had a television.
We didn't have a radio. We obviously didn't have
computers. We didn't have sort of anything
that we want to keep you inside the house.
Our whole connection and the connection of that community
and, and that world was to the land was to being out on the
water, to being out on the sea ice to so that's where as kids
we would play. That's where the the elders and
the hunters would get food for the community.
Everything was in this this outdoor world.
How easy was it to get supplies? Well, your supplies came once a
year by ship, you know, So you would order all your dried food
for the year. It would come by ship.
They would drop 2000 lbs of groceries on the shore in in in
August or early September when the Ice Breakers could finally
get through, drop off these big pallets of food.
And it was always a stressful time to make sure that you did
your shopping right. You didn't forget anything off
your shopping list. But I remember my parents
discussing you. How much did you get enough?
Did you get enough cereal? Did you get enough canned?
Whatever. You know, I mean, I grew up on
powdered milk. You could buy some fresh
groceries, but it was, you know, 6 to $8 in 1970 for a head of
lettuce, and it was $6 for a little jug of milk.
Back then, you just couldn't afford it.
So we lived on dried food and powdered food and canned food.
What kind of pets did you have? Didn't have any traditional
pets. We had often the Inuit hunters
would bring over and drop off a baby seal if they went out and
got the mom. And tragically, you know, they
would, they would eat it. But if they found this the pop,
they would keep it alive and bring it back to us kids to to
play with. And I had a pet seagull that I
had for a long time. His name was Sammy the Seagull
and the poor bird. He had a broken wing and which
is how he became my pet and I really protected him and took
care of him and loved Sammy and and I but I really wanted more
than anything was for Sammy to fly.
And on the weekends, you know, when I had some time, I would
take Sammy up to the top of a Cliff and I'm like, you can do
it Sammy. I didn't know anything about
broken bones or broken wings back then, but I just threw
sheer emotion and cheering. I'd huck Sammy off a 400 foot
tall Cliff and watch poor Sammy do this death spiral back down
to the earth. Hit that, hit the ground with a
thud and I'm like, Oh no, Sammy. And I'd run down there like, we
can do it, Sammy. Take poor Sammy back up to the
top of the Cliff and talk him again.
And so I had Sammy for a long time.
And that's not animal so. That's called true love for an
animal. And.
Yeah. And then tragically, somebody in
town got the only cat in town and the only cat ate the only
bird that couldn't fly. And.
And so I had to say goodbye to Sammy Bird.
Sammy But yeah, it's just, it's my childhood.
What's this I hear about your uncle bringing you a calf once a
year? Oh, my uncle, I, I would go to
the farm in the summer. You know, we'd leave the Arctic
for the summer when we had off school for two months and we
would go to the farm every year. And I was just, I was, I've
always been obsessed with animals.
And my uncle would always say, here's your calf.
And I would just love that calf. And I would remember his, you
know, his patterns of fur. And I would ride on him and hang
out with him, take him for walks and feed him.
And then every year I went back so excited to see my same calf.
And every year he always had a story for what happened to my
calf. But obviously my calf was
probably on our dinner plate back then and I didn't know it,
but I was always sad to lose him.
So you know, when you were growing up, there were times
when there were 100 mile an hour winds.
It's 30 below 0 and here you'd be running outside, burying
yourself in the snow and sitting there for hours.
Why? And what would you do?
You know you'd need to entertain yourself, so I'd love to if you
realize the insulating property of snow.
It was just fun to be out in a howling Blizzard like we did
have wind. I remember 1 storm, the wind was
over 100 miles an hour for a week.
And I, I was a kid and we just would love to sneak outside and
bury ourselves in the snow. And we often did that just to
see who could last the longest. You know, kids have to compete
and what do you compete with when you have no Xbox or
PlayStation? You do you bury yourself in a
snow bank and see who can last the longest before you.
You freeze and have to go back in the house.
But yeah, we had some bad storms to 1 storm that several people
died and where people were lost on the land.
And I, even my dad and the community went out to try and we
couldn't leave our house. We had a two-story townhouse and
you could not see out of the front window because the snow
bank was so high that it was over 20 feet tall blocking the
front window. In order to get out of the
house, we had to tunnel a tunnel that was under deep, deep snow
just to get out of our house. And so when we finally the storm
subsided, we had to basically dig out this whole community.
And I know that they went even to looking for places like the
correction center. You know, the police station was
A1 level building that was they were looking for it, but they
were sitting on top of it on what in their snowmobiles, like
saying, I know it's got to be here, but they'll complete, you
know, jail was buried by snow. So it's just.
How long does it take to uncover everything?
Well, once they got the heavy machinery, which was my dad's
job as well, was keeping the heavy machinery going in the
communities, once they got out, they could use power equipment
to start digging it out. But.
And were people OK? Yeah, generally everybody was OK
in the communities, just the people who are already on the
land who got trapped in that. A few people didn't make it
back. And you know, so it's just, it's
a, it's a harsh world. It's an unforgiving world.
How do you think your parents influenced you?
I think, well, it's funny, they neither of my parents were
really into nature or animals or I was kind of the weird kid in
the family that after school I would go and, you know, sit up
on the hillsides and watch the shadow play, you know, the, the
light play shadow games across the sea ice.
And that always I was always sort of a strange kid within the
sense that I loved art. I loved seeing the world in
light in, in shapes and patterns and in light.
And, and that always excited me. But my parents were, you know,
my dad was, you know, I, I look back and he was a provider for
the community. He was a strongman.
He was an honorable man. He, he could fix absolutely
anything when in a community like this.
It was, it was just impressive to see the Inuit who were
already incredibly gifted at fixing things because you have
to be able to fix things. But my dad was always in high
demand, fixing snowmobiles, fixing trucks, fixing, fixing
vehicles, fixing homes. I was just always, and my mom
was, I just loved how she got involved in the community.
She would go into bannock baking contest, you know, what should
they make bread or, you know, seal boiling contest.
And, and we were just very involved in the community and
very much a part of it. And I just really admired how
that day, my family was always very humble and very grateful
and, and just to learn that respect for other cultures and
other people's and other people's lives.
And and it was always I felt safe and, and felt like we could
navigate comfortably through through spaces like.
What do you think they did that, even if indirectly, LED you to
taking the path that you took? To be honest, my dad always told
me that photography was a waste of time and money and I needed
to get a real job and I needed to go off and become an engineer
or, you know, work for the government.
And, you know, that was that mentality back then, that you
had to get a job, work till you were 60, you retire and then you
start living your life. And, you know, and he resisted
me on that. But it's so funny.
When I wanted to leave my good government job when I was 26
years old, I had a lot of resistance from my dad.
My mom's like, son, go follow your heart.
You got to do what you got to do.
Yeah. Much more supportive.
She even would sneak me once in a while when I was starting
photography. She would sneak me in and help
me buy a one of my lenses that I couldn't afford or, you know,
but my dad was was pretty much against it.
But once I set off on the path and it looked like I was happy
and doing things. Well, he was then he just wanted
me to succeed in life. And once I showed that I was
successful in the path that I chose, he was then very proud,
probably more proud than anybody who just it was embarrassing to
go into his house that every wall was covered in my images,
that images that I was embarrassed about, you know,
because you grow as a photographer and it's just like
terrible photography. And he was just so proud of
these big prints that I'd given him through my path as a as an
artist. And yeah, so.
You're 8-9 years old and you take a photo and your mom helps
you develop it. How old do you recall that?
You know, I was just, when you grew up in the North as a kid,
you think that nothing is available to you.
I, I think you look at this big world out there and you're in
awe of the world. You're in awe of Jacques
Cousteau. You're in awe of everybody who
is achieving something in life. And I looked at everybody with a
camera. I'm like, that will never be
available to me in life. But you're just in awe.
And I remember my mom had a camera.
She had a Pentax K-1000, the simplest of manual cameras you
could have back then. And she had a little light room
in our in our food cellar. And she would go in there and
she would shoot black and white pictures and she would develop
them. And then she would process these
images and just seeing this world, this black and white
seascape come to life of Inuit hunters out on the ice hunting
and traveling. It's just blown away by it's
just, it was magic to me just to and, and all of a sudden to you
see it with your eyes. And then to see an image get
developed and come up and to even be more beautiful and more
beautiful representation of what you've just witnessed.
I just thought it was a powerful thing.
But at that point still as a kid, you would never think that
it was ever available to me. I didn't first pick up my mom's
camera until I was 16 years old, you know, so it's, but I was in
awe of the process. And she was taking outdoor
photos. Mostly outdoors with, with the
Inuit being on the land, we traveled a lot.
We would camp for weeks at a time, traveling across the sea,
ice going on, you know, hunting. And my dad again, providing for
the community and being out there with the Inuit and she was
capturing that, that way of life.
What was it about a picture you later took in college that you
showed to a professor that really impacted you?
Yeah, I remember I, I picked up a camera and I started shooting
and, and I, I just, I wasn't good, you know, I, I didn't
really grasp photography right in the beginning and I didn't
really understand how to take a good picture.
And, but all of a sudden I, I was obsessed with diving when I
was 19 years old, when I found out when I went to the
University of Victoria that I could for 150 bucks get
certified in, in diving and go beneath the waves.
And they had a really intense of course.
And then right away, I got a little my CONUS camera and I
took that camera down and all of a sudden just started shooting.
And I started becoming obsessed with bringing this underwater
world back up to the surface. And then when one of my
professors, Dr. Fontaine, who is a world authority in
invertebrate zoology, marine invertebrate zoology, I showed
him a couple of my images and he was like, wow, that is
incredible. Can I get a copy of that?
I need to use that for my teaching, my students.
And I was like, whoa, I have a purpose.
I mean, here's a guy who's the best in the world at what he
does. And here's little old me with my
camera who just impressed him in a world that he's an expert in.
I realized that there was a role for me in in visual
storytelling. Did that looking back, did that
really mean something? It really meant something
because I was a terrible student.
I was bad in school. I, I maintained like AC minus
average. Everything I was doing was
diving, diving, diving. My dad sort of would indicate to
me that I was a bit of a failure because my grades weren't good.
But I was obsessed with this diving and it was getting in the
way of everything else. And all of a sudden to have this
professor in my fourth year of university look at my images to
be just so not in awe, but just so what's the word for it?
Just so just impressed by by being able to capture this
world. I just think all of a sudden it
just was like a light went on that I have a purpose now I have
a role and, and what I'm doing, this path that I've been on,
that's this very intuitive journey that I've been on is, is
actually has purpose and, and I, there is a purpose for me in
this world with my camera. Now remember reading some story
that you were trying to convince your professor not to flunk you
in the class, at least give you AD where you promised you would
never go into that field. But to what extent did you,
like, feel like a failure because you just weren't cutting
it? I had, I was, I was really a bad
student. I had attention to deficit
disorder. I I could not, not medically
diagnosed, but I could never read a textbook.
I could never get through a paragraph.
If I was not interested in something, you could not force
me to read that or memorize one sentence of it.
So I struggled in school because I really didn't enjoy it.
When I grew up with the university in Baffin Island,
your school was on the land. You, you went out on the land to
learn about ice and snow and traveling and conditions and
changing elements and weather. We didn't spend much time in
school learning from books. So I've never learned to be a
good student. And now you're in university
trying to compete with this, this system of brilliant minds.
And I was, I was just barely getting by.
I was not into it. I was not happy.
But rather than run from it, I'm like, I'm going to finish school
as fast as I can. And so, I mean, I dove seven
days a week. My, my dorm room in, in
residence smelled like a seaweed farm.
I was not popular. They were going to kick me out
of residence on university. Because legitimately.
Legitimately, because I it stunk so bad in there.
I had all my dive gear in there. I had very little money.
I would go diving. I would often put my tank in my
dry suit and my dive gear on. I might get on my little
motorbike and I would drive off the dives and go do a dive and
get on my motorbike or drive back to residence.
Wouldn't you wear your dive suit to class sometimes?
No. Oh, I wore it outside a couple
times in the pouring rain, just being goofy.
But my wet suit. But like my dry suit I would,
which we use for diving in cold water.
One thing we would love to do is on a really stormy night, we
would get all our dive gear together, my buddies and I, and
we would head off to the breakwater in Victoria when the
waves were huge. You know, you've got 15 foot
waves pounding this breakwater, waves going over.
And we would just get down on these big rock, these big blocks
of concrete, and we'd wait for a wave to grab us and suck us off
on a little night dive. And we'd be down there just
getting worked by the waves. And, you know, all these things
that were fun at the time, That's where we got our
adrenaline. You know, they were teaching me
skills that would go on to help me later in life.
Same with, you know, what everything I was doing growing
up as a kid, whether it was on the land, hunting, fishing with
the Inuit, and then from the diving, every time I was sort of
pushing myself down this path, I didn't know that I was building
all the the skills that would allow me to go on to do the work
that I was going to do later on in life.
I understand at some point early on you would stay up all night
writing on paper what you wanted to do with your career.
Well, I was, it was actually, I was going into my genetics exam
and. You had an epiphany.
And I had an epiphany. I was just like, so miserable
trying to cram genetics, which did absolutely nothing for me.
It's important. I have a lot of respect for
geneticists. We need genetics.
Did 0 for my soul. And I'm trying to memorize this
stuff. And I'm like, I had five exams
in three days and I was miserable.
I'm like, I'm going to fail again.
And I hate this stuff. And so I, I, that's the, that
ties into the same story with me writing a letter to the
professor later in the exam, But I just, instead of studying, I'm
like, you know what, maybe I'm going to drop out of school
because I'm going to fail this exam.
I'm going to fail this course. I just can't keep doing this.
And I just started to sketch out and do goal setting all night.
I just started to write goal setting of what I was going to
do with my life, the animals, the species, the, the
storytelling, the conservation work that I was going to do with
my life. And I just started sketching out
this path forward for me in life.
And as I did that, and I was like going to work for National
Geographic someday, I was going to mostly specialize in the
polar regions, diving under the ice, bringing this world to the
this underwater water world to the rest of the world.
And I just started to energize me.
And by, you know, I'm still like late, late into the night and
I'm just like still going and excited.
Went into the exam again, it was just, it was just another
language I was looking at on that exam paper.
I knew I was going to fail. And I wrote the professor a
letter on my back of my exam. I said, look at I, I know I'm
going to fail this course. And I promise you I'll never go
into genetics. If you could just please set me
free. I want to be a National
Geographic photographer. I know what I want to do.
I'm proud to be a biologist. I want my degree.
If you could just pass me and, and sure enough, I, I went to
the board and I knew I'd failed because I didn't even write the
exam. I mean, I was just, there's no
point. And I went and looked up on the
board and there was AD and I'm just like, thank you so much.
Because you're young. You're only 20 years old and
you've were 21 years old and you've got this path in your
mind. You can feel it, you could taste
it. You want it.
And there's sort of life and being young all getting in the
way, all mixed up in this convoluted soup, you know, And
and it just at this point, just to to figure it all out, all of
a sudden you just got this little inch forward down this
path. And it's like, yeah, I must be
on the right path. You know, you just keep, keep
pushing. What made you feel that way at
the time? Yeah, just just the fact that
somebody believed in me, someone actually believed in, in what I
was believing in myself, you know, a professor.
I was scared of professors. You know, they're like gods to
you when you're in university and you're you're fearful of
them. And all of a sudden I was
supposed I'd expect a stern writing back.
No, here's your F. You know, if you're going to
take my course and I need you to be like, he set me free down
this path. And I was like, OK, that's one
step. Still had to get past my dad not
believing in my journey of a photographer and all that.
Well, so you don't become a photographer initially, you
become a biologist and you were depressed in being a biologist.
What about it made you feel that way?
I was, I love the work. The work to me, a lot of the
work was very important. I love my colleagues.
I I like the work that they were doing.
I think, of course, everything's built on science.
We need science. But what I didn't like is being
a government employee in a government office.
And I came into that with that same passion and conviction.
I'm going to save the world. I'm going to change the world.
And all of a sudden to come into this machine that just slows you
down and almost steals your soul and you sit there at your desk
for day after day being ineffective.
You know, and I even, I got this pretty high-ranking job at the
age of 22 years old as a government biologist.
And I, it took a year, but I took the first emotion I could
to become a field technician, a field biologist, which meant I
got a pay cut, which means I didn't have to spend as much
time in the office. I could be out in the field
helping other scientists who were very good at what they did.
And I basically help them with their their field research.
Why didn't you feel like you were abusing bears?
You know, any species I worked on again, the, the, the data is
quite important. But to take any animal, whether
it's a lynx, a Wolverine, a wolf, or especially a polar
bear, this dominant, powerful animal, this 1000 LB male bear
and to run it down by snowmobile to until it's defecating all
over itself or chase it by helicopter and it's, it's
pooping all over itself and just stick a dart in and it goes down
and it's just salivating. And you've taken this beautiful
Arctic nomad and reduced it into a pile of, of, you know,
sleeping fur on the ice. And then you cut a nail, take
some hair samples. You put a big green lip tattoo
into the skin on its lip. You punch holes in its ear.
And then you take on females only.
You take a big radio, satellite radio collar and you strap that
around her neck. And when you leave that animal
that I've always been in awe of, you've left this sort of
bleeding green dyed hump of polar bear.
And that's just not how I wanted to see bears, as you know, for
me to be sitting on the sea ice and to look out and to see a
mother polar bear and her two Cubs of the year, these two
little Cubs. And she's come out of her den
and she has to catch a seal. She's looking down and she's she
seals have six holes. So how does he she catch a seal,
though? She's I could watch her
stationing her seals at each hole.
And then she herself, when the seal would come up to breathe,
the Cubs would chase the the seal back down and it would
you'd see the other cub pounce. The seal couldn't get a breath.
And eventually the seal is panicking.
Mom's hiding it would come up. Mom would grab it, pull the seal
out and feed her Cubs. But to, to witness that and want
to photograph it versus turning that into a couple of data
points on a sheet of paper, You know, one didn't feed my soul
and the other one did. So after four years of this, I
was becoming more and more obsessed with photography and,
and going down that path, I'd again, I didn't know that it, it
was a path available to me. But obviously a government job
paid well. And, but at some point I against
every now my mom's against me, everybody's against me.
Do not quit a good government paying job.
All my colleagues said do not quit and.
And what was their reasoning? Just just you've got a security.
You're 26 years old now. You've got an amazing job.
What are you doing? I mean, if you crank this out
for 20 more years, you could retire.
And I'm like, guys, I'm out. I'm, I'm going to go go on a
journey and see if if I can make it in this world and not many
people make it, as you know, full time professional wildlife
and Nature Photographers. So then I set off on the
craziest journey of my life. You know, at that point.
Backing up momentarily, how do you think science is flawed in
terms of just connecting with people?
I mean, often the best scientists that I've ever worked
with, the the most brilliant scientists with the biggest
minds, with the biggest ideas, they're often almost always the
worst communicators. They are left brain dominant
people. They see the world in math and
numbers and data and they're brilliant.
But to have them convey that message to the rest of the
world, it's a disaster. They can't communicate.
Some once in a while you meet somebody who's somehow has both
hemispheres of their brains developed that they're amazing
scientists and they're amazing communicators, but it's not the
norm. And so that's where I started to
see my role. I mean, I hated data.
I hated reading scientific papers.
I did not, you know, I liked being out on the land with the
animals, but I didn't like the scientific process.
So I thought if I could just bridge the gap between this
important scientific work and the rest of the world by
becoming a visual storyteller, Now I see a role that I can play
in this journey. And I think when you quit being
a biologist, you'd like $65,000 in the bank.
Well, you're a good researcher, huh?
Done interviews too, but when you quit you had about $65,000
in the bank. Why decide to go alone to the
Arctic? You know, I had saved up
$65,000. And to me, at that point, it was
an endless supply of money. But photography is very
expensive. You know, just to buy my big
lens is $12,000. You know, to buy a new body is
$4000 a new camera body. So, I mean, you can go through
that money very quickly. So it's so funny.
I went from 65 grand in the bank, just quit my job cold,
jerky. And within a year, if you just
Fast forward that chunk of time, I was flat broke and I'd only
sold a couple of pictures and I wasn't making it.
But to start off now on that long road of seeing if I could
scratch out a living in photography, but you know, to
back up is when I left my job, I needed to essentially go, I hate
to say it, but find myself or to go process and I was angry.
I was frustrated, I remember. Angry at what?
Just at the world, at life, at the government, you know,
frustrated that I wasn't living my dream.
I wasn't on this path was path was purpose.
And I, I got this small grant to go on this expedition.
I think the government gave me $8000 as an artist grant and I
bought, you know, 200 lbs of food.
I took my camera gear, I took my camping gear.
I took my lifetime of knowledge of being out on the land, being
out in the wild and went up to a community called the Nuvik,
which is up in the Arctic Ocean. And I had him fly me a couple
100 miles or 300 miles out in the middle of the barren lands
in in May. It was icy and cold and, and
just basically winter. And he landed me on a frozen
lake and he dropped me off there with all my supplies and I took
all 600 lbs of gear out of his little airplane, had a sled to
pull things around, and I'd stopped in on the way to a
trappers camp to pick up an inflatable canoe.
I didn't even know if it would work.
And I began this three month journey of living alone on the
barren lands. How far were you from
civilization? I can't even remember but it
because, you know, we didn't have GPS back then, but I was
like far like you could never walk.
You were you were alone. And I just remembered this the
first couple of days when I put up my big tent and I'm sitting
there with all my gear and it's just deafening quiet.
A storm settled in like a Blizzard and I was just started
to like a little moment of depression of like, what the
heck am I doing? What I just left my job and I'm
sitting here in the middle of nowhere and like now what loser?
You know what you what are you going to?
I remember just, I find from being, you know, so frustrated
with my work that I had all these little voices in my head
and they're always, you know, sort of thing, you're going to
fail. And, you know, everybody who'd
sort of told me I was going to fail if I left my job, I had
these little voices nagging me. And I remember just sitting out
there on the tundra and, and, you know, being really concerned
and scared and worried and, and questioning everything.
And, and all of a sudden, after being out there for two weeks, I
almost slipped back to my childhood where I entered into
this meditative state of being out in nature again.
And everything calmed down. I started to see, you know,
wolves and bears and, and Falcons flying around and
eagles. And all of a sudden I started to
feel home again. And then all of a sudden the ice
broke up and the river came to life, the big Horton River
dumping ice. I go to the ocean and I started
to get my equipment ready to go on this expedition and sort of
all this negativity started to leave me and just sort of as a
joke. I remember my wife at the time
knew I was at a low point before this expedition.
And I had mentioned to her that, you know, at 3:00 in the morning
while I'm sitting there packing, eating a big bag of junk gummy
bears, that, you know, I was watching this dude on TV I'd
never heard of named Anthony Robbinson.
And I, you know, I didn't. I just mentioned it to her.
So as a joke, she kind of slipped his book into my gear.
And as an unpacking all my gear out there, I, I come across this
book by Awaken the Giant Within. And it couldn't have been
better. Because as I'm sort of working
through all these emotions, all of a sudden, here's goal setting
again. Here is if you know, you can't
hold a negative thought for more than 10 seconds.
If you do, you have to start over.
And I did these these things as I'm reading this book and all of
a sudden it took me 30 days to do the 10 days without a
negative thought. And all of that played a key
role. By the end of the expedition,
after three months, I remember being out there, I lost 50 lbs
and just hiking, hiked over 1000 kilometers.
I paddled hundreds of kilometers.
I turned into this fitness fitness machine out there, you
know, being out there in nature and I, the goal setting that I'm
doing, I couldn't, I didn't bring a big scrapbook, but I was
writing on everything I could, planning up my future again.
And all that affirmation started to bubble to the surface again
that I knew exactly what I was going to do for the rest of my
life. And I wouldn't have been able to
do that if I couldn't have had that clear time to to think and
reflect and be out there in fresh air.
So how do you get to the point then where you're broke and
sleeping in your car in -40° weather I.
Was like, no matter what I am going to make it in this, this,
this career as a photographer. And I went back and started to
photograph and shoot and try and get published in every magazine
I could and newspapers, whoever would have my work.
I would write articles for people.
And it was just, it wasn't enough.
I mean, photography is expensive, you know, to buy the
equipment and to travel and to go to locations and to live
there on the land. And, and, you know, I went back
to Baffin Island and photographed bowhead whales and
walrus. And, you know, it's just, it was
just an expense, expensive pursuit.
And I didn't understand the business.
I had no business sense. I didn't know you had to make
more than you were spending, you know, I mean, some basic
economics. And also before you know it,
you're broke. But it didn't bother me.
I kept finding ways to to to stay out there.
What was involved with being a Tundra buggy driver?
And I had to get creative and finding ways to stay out there
on the land to be around the animals and the species that I
wanted to photograph. So I thought, hey, I can't
afford to pay the $160 a day to go be on a tunder buggy
photographing bears. So I thought, hey, I have a
biology degree. You know, I worked as on polar
bears as a biologist helping other biologists.
And I thought if I could become a tundra buggy guy, I'm going to
be out there all the time. So sure enough, they accepted my
job application and now I'm a Tundra Buggy Dr. I'm driving
around these big tundra buggies with, you know, anywhere from 10
to 50 people on the machine with me entertaining them, teaching
them about bears. But every time a bear showed up,
I would. You know, it wasn't as if I had
the same privileges of photographing as a paying
client, but I still got to shoot.
And sure enough, lo and behold, one day I was on the buggy with
Tom Walker, who is an amazing or not, he'd done some work for
National Geographic, but an amazing wildlife photographer,
Tom Mangelsen was an amazing, one of the most famous wildlife
photographers in the world. And one night they want to see
my pictures and I'm showing them my polar bear stuff that I've
been collecting over the years as a biologist being out there.
And they're like, this is some of the best stuff we've ever
seen. I'm like, huh, really?
And they were like, keep going, you're doing great.
So that was just that affirmation again, that little
bumps along the way that that's why I mentor and and encourage
almost everybody I meet who are, who are chasing a dream, you
know, just give them little bumps and that means a lot.
What was involved with getting from there to no longer having
to take side jobs? I remember one day I was still
had to take a side job. I, I came back from Tunder
buggies and, and that's when the diamond mine diamond rush took
off in the Canadian Arctic. And, and I remember going and
sitting there with this machine that you had to handbrake
granite core to look for diamonds.
And so my job is to sit there for $11.00 an hour crushing
rocks with this machine till my in this cold garage.
And if that's not incentive to get back out there and keep
working and chasing your dream as a photographer.
I mean, it's just, and a lot of really great people along the
way, people who did me favors, people who would say, come into
our camp and come up in our helicopters and, you know, maybe
we'll get you out there to film the Caribou.
And, you know, just people helping you out along the way,
you know, and just doing all these little jobs where you're,
I really learned how to stretch a penny a long, long way during
that part of the journey, which has become important in the work
we do. And at what point did you
realize you no longer had to take jobs on the side?
Still, I still do jobs on the side, but no.
I mean, but the, you know, the photographs could sustain you if
you wanted. I think it was probably, I'd
been at it for maybe 5 or 6 years and I was starting to
make, you know, I was at that point spending 60 grand a year,
but making 70 grand a year. And I was like, I'm making it.
And then you know, by the next year I was making 100 grand a
year and spending 60 grand a year.
And that was at that point where I got mentored by Flip Nicklin
from National Geographic and Joel Sartori from National
Geographic. They took me under their wing.
One of which you first wrote to when you were I think 17.
I wrote Flip Nicklin, my mom helped me write him a letter
when I was 17 years old and explained and I mean I probably
get 5 letters a day right now saying the exact same thing.
I follow your work. This is my dream.
This is who I want to help become.
What can you help me with this journey?
And he never wrote me back. And I was pretty devastated.
And all of a sudden I found out that he was working, filming
polar bears, photographing polar bears for National Geographic.
And I said to everybody, I don't care what happens.
You must make Flip Nicklin and I come together on this, on this
thing. I was a tundra buggy driver.
And there he is. And I kept teasing everybody.
He was going all around the Arctic and everywhere I went
around the Arctic, I kept saying, you know, I have to meet
Flip Nicklin. And, and you know, I'm someday
I'm going to meet him someday I'm going to work with him.
And, and all of a sudden, one day I'm in my tunder buggy Dr.
and I'm working. I got my my guests on board.
And all of a sudden a tunder buggy pulls up and it's Flip
Nickel. And he's like, hey, it's Flip.
And here you're looking for me. I'm just like, and he goes,
let's go have dinner tonight. Let's talk.
And so we talked and, and it was great.
And then no way. Yeah.
And so I was just like, I'm just sitting there like my eyes are
this big and I'm just like, I'm 2728 years old now.
I'm just like, I can't believe this is happening.
So, so take me like into that dinner, like everything you
recall from it. I just remember sitting in this
corner and I remember I was like, you know, sometimes when
you're tired after a long day at work, you're eating like this.
I was just so proud. And so I'm like, I want to say
I'm with Flip. And I remember then Franz Lonten
walked in the room, who's one of the great photographers in the
world. I realized the respect that
these photographers had for him. And I was just like, wow.
And I was just very proud. And then all of a sudden it was
very interesting that his Thunder buggy broke down the
next day. And my, the company I was
working with said, sorry, Flip, your machine's done and we don't
know what to do. But you're out, you know, we, we
can't get you another machine. And Flip's like, but I'm on
assignment for National Geographic.
And I said, look it, I said, give me that piece of junk
little machine over there. Let's get it running a different
machine, a Thunder buggy. And I said, I will come off the
clock. I will guide Flip for free and I
will take him out for his week to fulfil his contract.
And so he we did and off we went together.
And for one week he just told me.
I just drilled him with questions and he just said he
was enjoying the moment and, and I just asked him thousands of
questions and just, I helped him and got him in position and
helped him get his shots. And all of a sudden here I am
with my mentor, my hero on a National Geographic assignment,
helping him and I'm even shooting behind the scenes for
him and, and stuff like that. We just had a an incredible time
together and, and, and he said, someday I'm going to help you
because you've got the drive, the passion, the commitment, the
work ethic, and I can help you with the final stages to get
there as a photographer. And, and he fulfilled his his
offer two years later. Really.
Yeah. He just called my wife and I at
the time and said, why don't you move down to Whidbey Island and
on in Coupeville and near Seattle, Move in with me.
I won't pay you, but I'll teach you everything I know and I'll
help you get into National Geographic.
And he did. Why did he do it?
I think at some point in your journey of life, you get to be
so good at what you do and, and you're you've reached the
pinnacle of your career. And I think in most of the great
people I've met, they always ask themselves, how do I give back?
And in this case, he saw somebody who had the potential
to to go all the way and to carry on the the, the torch of
doing good journalism, good conservation work and good
storytelling. And I think he just thought it
was a good investment of his time.
How do you go about preparing for a shoot?
Wow, I do a lot of research. It depends on if if I know the
subject intimately if it's a story.
My first story I did for a National Geographic was on
Atlantic salmon. It did took me 6 months of doing
research. I had 600 contacts in seven
different countries before I even took a picture, before I
even got sent on the assignment. O it's just a ton of research.
And then you have to get all your equipment and you've got to
get your rebreathers and your dive gear and your backup diving
gear and your your soft no line, which is a rebreathing supply.
You've got to pack your camera equipment.
You've got to figure out where you're going to stay and how
you're going to get that there, how much excess baggage is going
to cost. And you just fly there with all
your stuff on location and you always put yourself in position
in a staging area where you can work from there and go off and
do your shoes. And what's the process in which
you'll research? Just pick up the phone.
I mean, things have changed now with Google.
I mean, when I started, we didn't have Google, you know, so
back in the, the early 2000s, you know, in late 90s, early
2000's, the Internet was just kind of getting there and Yahoo
was terrible. And nowadays with the tools we
have today, but it's just picking up the phone and hey,
Joe and well, Joe, you should talk to Jane and Jane, you
should talk to Bob. And you know, you just keep
getting sent down down the path and eventually you, you meet
somebody. And my ultimate goal and
assignment is by the time you arrive on location, you've done
so you should have done so much research.
That you sketch those, the exact images that are burning in your
right side of your brain. Before I even go off an
assignment, I have a sketchbook of images that I'm going to make
that are going to allow me to tell my story for that for that
issue. And those images are what?
I call them the I, let's do a baseball analogy I have and
every story needs to have one or one, two or three home runs
where it's just so powerful that someone's flipping through a
magazine. It's just like, bang.
It is so powerful that you lure them into the story.
You need to have a few of those. Then you've got your
storytelling images, your point pictures, people pictures that
help expand that story. And then you love to end off
that story with another home run or another couple of home runs.
And, and you know, so you're, I call him your first base and
your two base hits are still important in a story to help win
the game, but you need the home runs to really grab people.
And how much is that what you call pre visualization?
Tons. I mean, I pre visualize
everything I do before I come up this coast where we're working
on bears right now. I have pre visualized where I
want to be in the river. I know exactly what image I want
to make. I know what lens I'm going to
need to make that. I know where I want the light in
the sky. And we say the difference
between an amateur and a professional photographer is
amateurs take pictures, professionals make pictures.
You know you. I only take 5 to 10 really good
pictures a year. And if they're going to be
amazing, then I need to know, I need to revisualize the light,
the tide, the current, the mood, the feeling that that image is
going to have. And in order to do that, so I
have to know where the moon's going to be.
I need to know where the sun's going to be at that time of day.
I need to know, is it going to be high or low tide?
I need to know, do I want the bear at the, the top of the tide
or at the bottom of the tide, you know, of the tide zone.
So I just, you visualize all these things and then you go
through the process of waiting and waiting and waiting for that
moment to come together. But that's the difference.
Nobody has the patience to wait one month for a spirit to bear
to come into the perfect location on a river to take that
picture. And if I could just back up
momentarily, how do you invest in getting the mood and edginess
right? How do you invest in it?
Yeah. What do you?
Sorry, what do you? Like how do you, I know that's
something that's important to you?
How? How do you do that?
I mean, a great image has to be evocative.
It has to be powerful and beautiful and intense and
wonderful. And in order to capture that,
you have to have the right mood. It has to have the right light,
the right composition. And the only way you can get
there is by is by pre visualizing this image that
you're going to make and then you set up and you wait for that
all to unfold in front of you. You can't force the conditions,
but the only thing you have is time.
You know if you when you're a professional photographer,
storyteller, you put in the time until all the elements come
together. How much patience do you need?
Endless. I mean, patience shouldn't even
be. When people say, wow, you have
patience, it's like, yeah, yeah, of course you have to have
patience. You need passion and the passion
for telling a great story, for having a conservation wind is
what fuels the patients. Because by the time when I
visualize an image that I'm going to make, then it's going
to come down. And sure, I'd love it to happen
on the first day, but it almost never does it.
It may happen on the first week, which would be great, but quite
often it doesn't happen the whole first season where you sit
there at they say in the fall for a 2 month stretch it doesn't
happen. But I just gained and learned
and gathered more Intel that's going to allow me to succeed the
next year. So my Narwhal story, for
example, that was seven years of going back every year before I
figured that out for two good hours of shooting in seven years
on Narwhals, my spirit bear was three good days of shooting in
two seasons. You know, it's, it's just
putting in that amount of time to succeed.
And I'm very proud that I've never failed a story at National
Geographic. Out of the 22 assignments I've
done, I've been close, I've been really close.
But I just persevere and pushed through and and just dream of of
of succeeding. And it was funny yesterday when
we were out with you. I mean, you know, we're sitting
around almost the entire day, and then in the half hour or so
before we're supposed to leave, all the action happens.
What? What's the longest you've had to
wait for before? Again, you know, like the
longest I've ever had to wait is, you know, going back, going
to film narwhals, for example, in the in the 90s, I would go
there every year and I would sit on the sea ice and one day I,
the season was late. I sat in my tent on the sea ice
with one storm after another packing in the ice.
And you know, so for the first month we the ice didn't move and
didn't even have the concept of seeing a narwhal, you know, so
and then go back to next year, bad conditions.
I mean, but maybe you start to see a couple blows in the
distance and that gives you hope.
And then going back to 3rd and the fourth year and getting some
stuff, but not really the stuff you need.
And going back to 5th year. And then the 6th year I realized
I need to buy myself an ultralight airplane and put it
on an amphibious floats and take off from the sea ice and go land
out on the drifting pack ice. And that's how we were going to
get those narwhal pictures. And that's ultimately how that
happened. But it was just this process of
learning to get these images, you know?
What's the longest you've gone without sleep?
I've gone for 2 1/2 days without food and sleep just on the
narwhal shoot where it just did not want to.
We were in the zone, it was happening, things were happening
and we had to get it now and we just worked through for over
about 55 hours straight. How do you last that long and be
conscious, coherent? When you've been chasing
something for eight years and it's in front of you and it's
happening, you know you don't need anybody.
You know, you're it's the opposite of a government job
where you watch the clock and you go in and then you do your
88 hours and you go home. I mean, it's just like you were
so fueled up on adrenaline at this point because it's all
happening and you're so high on life because you were witnessing
things that you've only dreamed of witnessing.
You've been failing. I've been now failing for eight
years and all of a sudden I'm succeeding.
Factor doesn't sleep doesn't factor into the equation.
At that point, getting the shot, getting the story and getting
these images is what matters. And that's.
It How do you think you've grown as a photographer?
I think I've matured greatly as a photographer.
I don't panic anymore. We're I've gotten rid of all the
little voices that come into my mind of you're not good enough.
You're not you're going to fail at this assignment.
You're out of your league. They're not going to like your
work. They're they're going to see
through you. They're going to see that you're
a fraud. All those little voices that
come into your mind at the beginning of every major shoot,
You're never going to get the pictures.
The narwhals aren't going to show up to the polar bears are
going to run away when they see all those the neurosis that
feeds into your mind. So when I mentor young
photographers now, it's very much helping them deal with
their little voices that we all have them where they try and
beat you down, all those negative voices.
And it's just now I go into an assignment going, I'm going to,
I'm going to crush this, you know, I'm going to go do the
best body of work ever done on the species in this habitat.
And, and the readers are going to love it.
We're going to educate people. We're going to have conservation
wins and we're going to make change.
You'll take 50 or 100,000 photos for a 12 photo assignment.
Why? The most I've ever shot an
assignment was 100,000 images and I try and not torture my
poor editors at National Geographic.
I try and get anywhere from 20 to 40 or 20 to 50,000 images,
which is a lot of pictures. That's like that's over 12 to
1500 rolls of film. Back in the days when we were
shooting film. That's just torture to anybody
to look at that much photography.
But I, I again, I've, I've visualized it, I've sketched it
on a piece of paper. I've burned that image into my
mind and I may get close over and over and over, but I don't
let it go until I get it. And either better than what I
visualized or, or almost as good.
But I just have to keep pursuing that.
And that means I've shot that image.
Like, take any example, an emperor Penguin flying out of
the water coming at me. I knew that was a picture I was
going to take on that assignment.
I got it the first day, probably good enough to publish, but it'd
be OK. It'd be just an average picture
in the story. Here is a situation that had a
chance to be amazing. I shot it every day for 30 days.
Every day when they'd some Penguins that come flying out of
the water, I'd be there to keep hitting it hitting.
So out of my 100,000 pictures on that assignment, you know,
15,000 of them are Penguins flying at you.
And there's hundreds of keepers. There's only two that are
really, really, really, really good.
What was? It's the difference between
those two and the rest. Just that three-dimensional
feel. I want to transport people into
my images. I want them to be there.
I want them to feel what it's like to be next to me with an 80
LB bird going 30 miles an hour, flying through the air, about to
hit you in the head, water exploding off his body as he's
coming out of the water. I want them to feel that.
In order to do that, I have to have.
I have to be close, it has to be wide, it has to be intimate.
And that's where you get that. I don't want my pictures to be
images that you look at. I want pictures.
I want my images. I don't want my pictures to be
something that you look at in this sort of two-dimensional
plane. I want my images to be
three-dimensional where you feel like you're inside that you're
in this world. And that's really, really hard
to do with photography to take an image where I've transported
you into that image. And I think that's that's sort
of one of the my specialties is really, really close intimate
portrayals into these animals lives that people feel like
they're there. And how do the number of photos
that you'll take on a shoot compared to other top
photographers? Some, like the wildlife
photographers, I mean, Flip Nicklin could go shoot 20 rolls
of film on narwhals and come back with a successful story.
He's so good at visualizing what he wanted to do.
I'm not like that. I need to sketch and feel and
work my way into that situation. And for me, it's a long process
of feeling with my camera. Everyone works differently.
So Nick Nichols is another, you know, person I respect at
National Geographic. He shoots up to 100,000 in a
story, huge number of images. Joel Sartori shoots 10 to
20,000. Brian Scary, who I work with,
shoots 10 to 20,000. So I just, I just my editors, I
think, see my hard drive came in and I could feel them.
I just feel them. What the process for them in
going through it? It's a process of elimination.
So if I shoot 100,000 pictures, they have to look at every
frame. Every frame has to be shot in
RAW. Can't be a JPG because you can
manipulate Jpg's. They need to look at every RAW
image. They want to see the sequence.
They want to see your process as a photographer unfolding.
And like my editor at Kathy Moran, my editor at National
Geographic, Kathy Moran, the poor woman, she's, she's amazing
what she does, but she's like, you shoot every picture and I'll
look at every picture. Never worry about shooting too
much. And so she'll take 100,000
images and probably chop it down to 10,000 the first round, then
down to 2000. Then she'll look at them all
again. She'll get them down to 500 at
that point. Then I'll fly to the
headquarters in Washington DC. And then together we'll look at
the top 500 images and we'll discuss the merits of each and,
and ultimately we get down to our 40 images that we're going
to show the editors at National Geographic in a slide
presentation. Everybody, all the the mucky
mucks at Nat G are all sit in this little pressure cooker
room. Wait, wait.
And before you get to that point, it takes her how long to
cut down all those photos. Weeks, weeks or weeks to sit
there and cut down to go from 100,000 images and most people
go through their pictures and they go.
I like this one, this one, this one.
You can't do that. I mean my my spirit bear cover.
I never liked the picture in the beginning.
I but I kept seeing it. I didn't like it didn't, but it
was good enough to keep around. And by the time we got down to
the final sixty images, it's just like my editor looked at it
and he went, that's an amazing picture.
And I'm like, really why? And we discuss it and I'm like,
like, yeah, you know what? You're right.
Then you all of a sudden fall in love with it.
Now it's one of my classics. And I did not like that picture,
but I had to see it through the process of elimination 10
different times before I fell fell in love with it.
So that room in DC with the National Geographic editors, you
come in with how many photos and set the scene and what goes on.
You go in there with your images and you sit down in the very
front seat. The director of photographer
sits next to you. The CEO often, quite often comes
into that room. They invite their other donors
and supporters of National Geographic in the room.
All the other department heads are in that room.
All of a sudden, there's 40 people in that room sitting
behind you. And National Geographic is a
magazine. They always say to us, you know,
we pay you to make images, not excuses.
It better be good because somebody, David Doublay, just
went before me. Flip Nicklin just went before
me. Nick Nichols just went before me
in that room. And they're the best in the
world at what they do. They're the Wayne Gretzky's of
photography. And all of a sudden you're up
and it better be good. And you have to sit there and
you have about 15 minutes to spin your tray of 40 images and
you don't get to touch the remote.
You're in the middle of saying this was a unique situation
where the Sea Wolf clique, they cut you off.
They just advanced over you while you're in the middle of
talking and you talk about dry mouth.
You just feel the pressure because it's like they're not
interested in what you're saying or the pitcher's not good
enough. They're all busy.
They've got jobs to do, and they don't have time to sit, sit and
listen to you brag or pontificate or, you know, or, or
make excuses or try and justify things.
They just start cutting you off as you're doing.
Yeah. So you're like this was.
And still happens now. Well, not so much now.
I mean, I'm at a point now where, you know, when you've
been there for 20 years, you've sort of figured out the system.
You know that they're busy and you don't talk for too long.
But the nervous when I was first there, nervous and young talk,
talk, talk, you know, trying to give them as much information as
you can and and you know, they're busy and they start
cutting you off. I had one time my editor, I came
in with a story with that was not very good on the Phoenix
Islands. It was just a a short
assignment. The quality of the work wasn't
great. You know, it was just a whole
bunch of things happened. My editor and I, Kathy Moran, we
weren't getting along about the story.
She's, you know, she was calling me out and she was 100% right
on, on the why it was weak. And I got defensive and I went
into this room and and Bill Allen, the editor in chief, he
sat down with the remote and every picture I started to talk
to, he cut me off and he cut me off for all 40 images.
And I by the time I didn't bring any water in the room, I forgot
it. I was sweating.
The room was spinning. I thought I was going to block
out. And I thought of my career is
over. Like this dream.
I've been just put 20 years into getting here.
It just blew up in my face. I'm over, I'm done.
And that's an awful feeling in that room with everybody sitting
there watching you crumble. And turned out he was late for a
meeting and he had to go and he didn't want to listen to me talk
too much. So he just cutting me off, you
know, and and the editor in chief turns around to everybody
and they go, any thoughts? And everyone's like, no, OK,
walk out of the room. No thanks.
No pat on the back. Or I mean, now it's that's the
beginning of my career Now it's like, great job.
Wow, good work. Thanks a lot.
You know, we're our readers are going to love this.
And so you do get a lot of positive praise, but it's it's
kind of like being in the NHL that you get a contract and
you're paid to be good. You're not paid to do OK and get
a pat on the back. You know, it's like we pay you,
you better deliver. It's a job.
And and it's a it's a scary place to work when you work for
National Geographic. It's like being in the NFL,
except there's only one team. And every time I said, like, I
want to go do this story, like, who are you better than that?
You know, who are you going to knock off the team?
No, no, he's our quarterback. No, he's our wide receiver.
Who are you going to replace on your team?
And you start to think, yeah, I'm not good enough to replace
people on this team. You know, you, you have to earn
your spot on the team. And the only difference is
you're only as good as your last story.
Just like a a football player, you're only as good as your last
season. You know it doesn't guarantee
you a lifelong career in the same same thing with
photography. What do you mean when you say
the work is like your drug? I just, I think when you are
such a visual person for me to, and you have chased something
for so long, you know, when I, I, I don't understand drugs.
I understand people do drugs and obviously there's a, a major
global industry around it. But for me, I, I can't imagine a
bigger, more powerful, more potent drug than having a dream.
And especially something as beautiful as a spirit bear or a
polar bear or a narwhal that you've worked so long for to
pursuing this image that you know that you're going to help
do create positive change through this photography.
When all those things come together at once and all the
little voices leave your mind and you've succeeded in this
assignment. And you, the drug for me is just
being close to these animals to, you know, when so many people
have fear of a grizzly bear, but you're sitting there 5 feet from
a mother and her Cubs in a river and she's accepted you into her
world and she's feeding and you're a family on the wall.
I mean, that's my drug at the feeling that I get and being
around these animals alone in their habitat, helping tell
their story, help helping give them their voice is, is, is my
drug. And that's what just just feeds
my soul and I'll that's what I'll never get tired of.
How often do you work? Too much, you know, I, I work
nonstop. I mean, I work every day, seven
days a week. And, and that's why I struggle
when I try and mentor these young photographers like, Oh,
I'm going to go off with the, you know, the family or paddling
in my canoe for a couple of weeks and I'll be back.
And I'm like, you work every day and, and when you're on
assignment, you work 18 hours a day or whatever it takes.
You work 12 hours a day or 10 hours a day.
And when you have a really bad weather day, that's your day to,
to read a book or to, or just to rest or to try and recover your
energy. I love a big Blizzard when I'm
on the sea ice and it's blowing 80 miles an hour and your tents
just like screaming. I'm like, I am forced to take
some downtime and I like that moment.
But the rest of the time you're out there working and, and once
you've done your job, once you've come back with all these
images and your, your visuals to share with the world, then
you've got to edit them. Then you've got to get into
lecture tour and then you've got to do your social media.
It's, it's endless. But I I can't imagine any other
path. So seven days a week on average.
How many hours a day you think? You know, on a, you know, like
one of the big things that I love to do is to go home and
ride my mountain bike, you know, but now I'm finding that harder
and harder to do this to pull an hour out of my day to get on my
mountain bike and just go burn off some energy.
And, but it just depends if you're in the field, you're
working in a way 24 hours a day. When I work in the, it depends
where I'm working. If I'm working in the Arctic or
in the Canadian Arctic in the summer, I get up at six PMI wake
up at six PMI have breakfast till at 8 PMI prep all my gear,
you know, and getting all ready. And by 10:00 PM I'm out the door
on my snowmobile and I shoot until 6:00 or 7:00 AM when the
lights beautiful. I've shot through the whole
night, which is now, you know, 24 hours of sunlight.
So I've shot through that whole evening and then I'm back and
prepping all my gear and putting all my stuff and downloading my
pictures until noon. And then I'm in bed at noon.
And then I, I sleep till 6:00 PM.
And then so that's my cycle. When you're a wildlife and
nature photographer specialist, you work to the rhythms of
nature. And that that could be, again,
like working 48 hours straight when the conditions are right,
or hunkering down when the wicked Blizzard comes along.
And we were talking about this the other day, but vacation.
I'm trying to force myself to pick up a new sport to so I can
force myself to have a focus and have a vacation.
The concept of me, I've tried to go sit on a beach and read a
book for that. I don't think I can get past two
minutes. It just will never work.
I'll have to go meet somebody and talk to somebody, you know,
and, and, and, and just just learn and I just start to.
It's just too interesting. Life is too fascinating to sit
there and do nothing. So I've decided to pick up
kiteboarding. So now at least I'm energy.
I'm I, I need energy and, and I energizes me and I meet really
interesting people and I'm out there forcing myself to learn a
new skill and I'm really loving kite boarding right now.
So I'll force myself for about this year.
I was able to get out seven days this year out of my kiteboard,
which was a record for me. That means 7 days of total
vacation this year. Yeah, but you're still meeting
people and talking and writing in your journal and getting new
ideas and planning new assignments.
And, but to go offline, away from the Internet, away from a
phone, to be out in nature, just you and the wind and your kite
out on a lake all day. Is, is, is is a very powerful
thing. And I come back just jazz.
But then I'm, of course I'm, yeah.
Goal setting again. Always, always thinking of the
future. How healthy do you think it is
not taking? I think it's unhealthy IIA lot
of my best ideas come come to me during a Blizzard when I'm
forced to hunker down. When I'm forced to do it's, it's
basically anytime you anytime I take a break, I get new big
ideas. And so I the more I the more
time I can take off. But I'm with my partner,
Christina Mittemeyer, who's I think will literally save the
planet. And I'm just trying to keep up
to her. And when soon as I take a couple
hours off, she looks at me and like, don't we have stuff to do?
You know, we need to get on this conference call, phone this
person, do this. And, and it's just, yeah, you
balance that with having to come home from I'm on the road 10
months a year and to come home for those two months and also
you have to fix your boat. You got to fix your house.
You got to deal with this and this and that.
And but, you know, I'm, I'm on this conveyor belt of life and
it's, it's pretty darn exciting, you know?
What are the drawbacks of being on the road 10 months a year?
Fitness people think, you know, you're, you're a photographer
out there, but you know, it's, it's being in hotels, it's, it's
not eating the way you want to eat.
It's, it's not getting enough fitness, not having a routine.
You know, when I'm home for three weeks, it's amazing how
much better I feel just eating right every day, working out
every day and in this routine, waking up in your bed feeling so
energized and refreshed. But our lives are out on the
road and that's, that's where we have to go.
So I'm trying to find ways to really every hotel I ever stay
in, everywhere I go, I need a some sort of form of fitness and
just learning to do more yoga and, you know, more stuff on the
fly. How does it impact the personal
life? It was brutal.
I was married to a great lady in, in the Yukon, or, you know,
for, for 20 years. And just seeing her for a month,
a year is not a normal marriage. You know, we never had any kids,
but you just really grow apart with that person.
If you see them a month, a year, 11 months apart or, you know, a
really Goodyear would be home. I'd be home four months.
You know, in the worst years I was home a month.
Would she come and visit you? Sometimes, but generally what I
do is not a very romantic job. You know, it's sitting in sort
of uncomfortable places and grinding it out.
And so very rarely did she ever come in the field to see me.
And, and you know, 20 years of that and, you know, it's just,
it's just hard on a marriage. So now my new partner is, is she
does exactly what I do. We travel almost always
together, We do our work together and it's just much,
much healthier. Why decide against having kids?
I mean, my first wife, she couldn't have kids and and it's
just I love kids. And I know, I mean, my better
answer is, I mean, I decided early, early on we could have
kids. This is the truth there.
But I decided early on not to have kids.
You know, when I'm sitting here preaching on climate change and
the impact we're having on this planet, I thought, I'm always
saying, what's the ultimate sacrifice?
And it's it's not having kids. And also when you're gone 10
months a year, 11 months a year, you're not going to be a very
good dad. So my kids became the
environment, you know, became nature.
Being out there trying to protect our planet has become
sort of my fatherhood and my dedication to that.
And everybody, people are always like, wow, you're really excited
to meet my kids. So I think when I meet other
people's kids, I get a little excited.
I want to wrestle and play with them and play catch and go
swimming and goof around with them.
I just love other people's kids. And and that's been, that's been
a good part of the journey. How much of A struggle, if at
all, was that for you in balancing whether or not you
wanted to have kids with the passion for the work that you
were doing? That's always was my biggest
struggle as I was obsessed with my work.
I loved every bit about it. But I realized it wasn't life.
It wasn't a normal life. And I would always look at
normal lives and I would come to visit my friends when I get home
from these expeditions and they'd be having a BBQ by a lake
with their family and they would all be having normal
conversations, you know, but I had just come back from a three
month solo expedition of living with the wolves and the bears,
you know, which was my drug. But all of a sudden I went wait
a minute and and it was hard because I would look at their
lives and I became not envious. The end.
It would have a beautiful world. It's called tushu.
It's it's in their culture. They don't have something of
jealousy. Jealousy is not healthy.
But Tushu means I'm happy for you, but I wish for the same for
myself. So I found myself craving this
other world of family and kids and normalcy and routine and,
and I just, it's still sort of haunts me to this day that I
don't have that I'll never have that.
I'll never have that normal life of sitting around with my kids
and, and kids that I've, you know, conceived and, and watch
grow up and watch them. You know, when I go to, so when
I go to like National Geographic, I stay with really
good friends and I've known their kids since they were two
years old and now they're 14 years old and I just love them
like they're my own. I have my godchildren who I'm so
proud of. And you know, but I sure I, I'll
never have that, that feeling of, you know, I love the concept
of being a dad and passing on your knowledge And, and you
know, if I could have had time for that, I would love that.
Why has your loss of fear bothered you?
You know, it's, I think that every time I'm about to do
something dangerous, whether it's getting in the water with a
leopard seal or a polar bear coming up on you or, and again,
you know, I can talk about near death experiences.
For every near death experience I've had, I've had 10,000
beautiful experiences. So those bad experiences sort of
fade from your mind. The most, the scariest things
that have ever happened to me generally have happened in a car
on a highway, icy conditions, you know, in the rain.
So it's not like I have a whole bunch of near death experiences
with animals, but almost all of my near death experiences have
come at my own hand falling through the sea ice crashing
Jeff crashed 2 airplanes. Those types of near death
experiences. But sorry, what was your
question? It's.
Like you haven't had that, then you're listening above.
I'm like, well, it's a lot more than most people, but how?
How was your loss of fear started bothering?
You. Yeah, it's, it's my I every time
I'm going to do something dangerous and that's say to get
in the water or not even dangerous, but unknown.
And you're about to get in the water with 1000 LB predator or
1000 LB grizzly bear walks up to you and everything in your body,
your gut, you know, your instincts are saying this is
bad, you're going to die. And through what I do with my
work is you've learned to ignore these things when I take off in
a storm in my ultra lighter and bad weather, and I'm pushing,
pushing myself to go get these images, your body's saying don't
do this. And I've called that the Gray
area. And I would just say that that
fine line of what's going to kill you and what isn't has
turned into this big muddy Gray area for me.
And so that's where that's what I'm scared of right now that I'm
like, I've done all these other things where my, my stomach has
told me that I'm going to die if I do this.
And you lived. And so now you just keep pushing
it and pushing it and pushing it.
So now I'm at a point where I think I've pushed the limits of,
of, of death or the limits of, of what's possible and what
isn't. And, and I'm at the point now
where I'm starting to listen to my gut a little more.
You know, I don't want you are. Yeah, I definitely, I'm, I'm
definitely slowing down in the sense that I won't push myself
to 220 feet on a dive if it's. I'm watching my friends die
around. My friend Rob Stewart just died
on a rebreather. He was a guy who was going to
save the world and he was going to live forever.
And when your friends around you die, you know, I was working in
the Canadian Arctic a few years ago and working with a close
friend of mine on our snowmobiles and we fell through
the ice a couple times and we were able to get ourselves out
and it was almost fun and adventurous.
And then I went back home and two days later, I get a call
that he went through the ice on a snowmobile and died.
And you're just like, it's you start to realize that you are
not invincible, that you, you will die if you keep pushing too
hard. And so, and you know, my friend
Joel Sartori always tells me you can't take pictures when you're
dead. So it's, you know, it's, it's my
goal now is to stay alive and stay in the game and keep, keep
doing what I'm doing. And and sometimes I have to say
no to dangerous situations. Are there other ways in which
you found yourself cutting back in terms of staying away from
some of the danger? Not really.
I mean, I'm, you know, like, I mean, yeah, I think so.
I mean, I, you know, flying my ultralight airplane, I started
to realize that after 2 airplane crashes and five engine failures
of trying to do something, you know, to flying is one thing,
but trying to switch hands when you're in the cockpit, you take
the doors off your little pusher ultralight and you got your
camera and you're you're trying to, you know, work with, you
know, fly and shoot at the same time low level over the trees
near mountains to get AB level photograph was not a smart use
of time and luckily new technologies coming out.
I have now crashed over 10 drones and destroyed a few into
the ocean and lost them forever and I'm fine.
You know, it's let's use that technology to and actually the
visuals and the I'm obsessed with flying, but I love flying.
But it's just leave that for flying, you know, and don't try
and involve work and and mix those two worlds.
But yeah, I mean, I've done some really now you got me thinking
about done some stupid stuff like trying to get aerials in
the Arctic before I bought my ultralight airplane to film
narwhals. I hooked up a para sail that we
had shipped through the mail that we had never opened before.
We threw it out on the sea ice. I hooked it up to a snowmobile
and told my buddy just to yank me off the ice and all of a
sudden I'm I'm 400 feet up in the air behind a snowmobile with
a para sail and the back of the snowmobile is coming up.
So my buddy jumped on the back of the ran up and jumped on the
back of the snow wheel to keep it down.
Then a crack opened up in the ice and there's a tailwind and I
fell the final hundred feet. When this when the para sail
came down, I bounced off the ice sort of ended up in this big
slushy hole. My into a guy just stood over
and be going oh laughing because it was like a nervous laugh.
He thought for sure I was dead. I was surprised I wasn't dead.
And I mean, just stuff like that.
I'm going to stop doing stupid stuff.
I I want to start eliminating stupid stuff and just cowboy
decisions and just be a little more calculated and thoughtful.
So when you go down in cold water, describe the feeling and
why you vomit. I used to vomit, now I work with
a manufacturer called Waterproof Diving out of Sweden and I help
them custom design some of their ice diving stuff so I no longer
have the vomiting issue when I go down.
But what? What's the difference?
The difference is just wearing equipment that was so thin,
designed for diving in British Columbia.
Thin hoods, thin neoprene, just not properly fitting gear.
You know, if you ever had an ice cream headache where you drink a
slur, do one of your Starbucks drinks too fast, you get that
ice cream headache, except you get that over your entire head
and just for some reason with my body's reaction is just to start
puking. But now I've wear enough
equipment now, much better design hoods and stuff, that
that problem doesn't happen. But because you're warmer.
Just warmer, like a big 10mm proper fitting hood that's, you
know, just tight around your face.
As to a really poor fitting thin neoprene hood, it's just massive
difference. Can you still not feel yourself
when you're taking photos? Do you still have all those
problems? So I mean, you go down so I just
don't vomit anymore. But you within 5 minutes, you
lose all feeling in your lips and your face.
And within, you know, 15 to 20 minutes, you lose all feeling in
your extremities, your hands, your, your feet, Everything gets
extremely cold. That, that feeling goes away
after about half an hour to 40 minutes of diving in water
that's 2829°F. You start to shiver.
After 40 minutes. Your body's reaction is trying
to warm you up. You're just cold almost to the
point your teeth are chattering on your rag.
You're just, you know. And after about an hour of that,
the shivering stops. You haven't felt your
extremities for 40 minutes that your body's going into something
that's, it's like a blood shunting where it's keeping the
blood to your heart, to your core, to your brain.
It's removing it from your extremities, trying to keep you
alive. And from there you, you just,
you know, at that point when you start to cramp up, the shivering
stopped. If you're not getting out of the
water by then, you're in trouble.
And I've just, I found myself pushing it to that point a few
times. And that's another indicator now
that I get out when the shivering starts, you know, I
don't wait to the point where I'm cramped up and I can't move.
And you're, you're under the ice.
If something happens, you're, you get a free flowing regulator
and all of a sudden you have to react, but you can't because
you're, you're not thinking right, you're not feeling right,
you're not working right. You're your motor skills aren't
there. So it's just putting yourself in
liability again. And that just comes down to
decision making. What health issues do you have,
including nerve damage? Yeah, I have, you know, just
have had frostbite so many times.
I've got. Yeah, you know, just when they,
when other people outside are just starting to feel cold, my
fingers are already burning. I've had them, you know, frozen
so many times. And just that, you know, those
are the main, main things that bother me.
Got it. And we had, I mean, you just
have to be conscious of that then.
Yeah, not even really just just dealing with the, it's all pain
management, just being cold. It's the same as you know, I
used to be terrified of getting a sunburn, but getting a
frostbite didn't mean anything to, you know, to freeze my nose
or freeze my cheeks or to freeze my ears.
I used to freeze my ears every day walking to school and
yelling like trying to look cool for the girls, thinking somehow
that big frozen pussy ears wasn't as attractive as a as a
hat and I refused to wear a hat by gully.
But you know, having these big swollen pussy ears was OK you
know. And then my buddy in my class
who wore a big goofy hat and a big park and a scarf and just we
all laughed at him. He ended up getting the cutest
girl in the class. So we changed our ways after.
But silly things we do. I want to run through some near
death experiences and get you to recall the moments, the first
one being the second dive when you were 19 years.
Old you really did went deep on research.
Yeah, You know, I've had some moments diving that I'm.
I'm very lucky, you know, at any time you can have a near death
experience and get to walk away from it and learn from it.
It's a very powerful learning tool.
It's it's when it kills you that it's a bad thing.
And my second dive out of the course, I had a new dry suit
that didn't even really understand how to use a dry
suit. It's different than diving in a
wet suit. I'm 19 years old.
I'm diving off of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, just
collecting crabs for dinner because I had no money.
I was living off the ocean and my buddy and I are and I had a
much bigger tank than he did and he was just better on air than I
was. I didn't understand that at the
time. And we're just swimming along
and all such. I'm out of air and I'm like, how
can I be out of air? He's not out of air.
So I'm sitting there burning up valuable time processing that.
I've just run out of air and I'm 40 feet deep and I have way too
much lead weight on because I'm pushing along the bottom digging
up these crab. And so I reach up and I grab him
and, and we start to share our air.
We're going up to the surface and I keep trying to add air to
my suit, but I have no more air, you know, just stupid stuff.
And, and we start sharing back and forth, but I'm starting to
hog his air now because I'm kicking so hard to go up because
I have no air to put into my suit or my BCD.
And we start kicking up all the sediment.
All of a sudden he loses me and he lets me go.
I sink back to the bottom now and I'm tired and he's gone up
to the surface and I'm back on the bottom and I'm like, you
know, but I've just done all my training and I know that you
have to dump your weight belt. No problem.
I go to dump it. All I'm grabbing are lead
bricks. All my belt has spun around on
my suit and the belt buckles underneath my tank.
And as I'm feeling this, I'm starting to black out.
I'm just like me to feel myself going down.
I'm just like, and it was not that scary at that point.
It's sort of almost peaceful, but I just I Remember Remember
thinking, oh, my buckles under my tank and just frantically,
just sort of not frantically, but just grabbing and all of a
sudden was my buddy on the surface and he shook me.
He's like, dude, and I sort of went down on the way up, I
blacked out and just that close to to hit the surface and him
shake me on, you know, and, and like to have not held my breath
and popped along to have not, you know, all these things that
could have gone wrong on the way up and could have drowned.
And this that was just like, wow, so you don't think I don't
check my gauge every 10 seconds on a dive?
You're just like, you know, after thousands of dives and I
still have, I had another one like that where I'm down at 120
feet with a buddy ran out of air.
But I look at my gauge and I've been checking it and the gauge,
it still says I have half a tank.
What's happened is that through bad gear maintenance, my gears
corroded and it's stuck at 1500 PSI.
And you know, it's, and I'm, I'm questioning it now.
And my buddy again was a long ways away and I, I kicked and
kicked to him. By the time I grabbed him, I was
just like, you know, I was like holding my breath for a long
time. And we went up to the surface
again together. And it's just all those things
you feel really lucky to to to be able to learn from those
moments. Chasing the walrus in Greenland
and your regulator freezing. So diving with walrus is like
diving with hippos. It's just nobody does it.
It's stupid. You're going to get killed if
you do it. And it's one of those as you're
going down chasing walrus. And in this case, really bad
visibility. We were very unlucky with a big
algae bloom that the water was terrible.
The viz and chasing this animal that's got a really notorious
for having a bad temper for I've had them attack me before I've
had them put their tusks through my boat.
I've had them RIP open the floor of my Zodiac before.
And now here we are getting in the water with them to try and
reveal their world, you know, to the rest of the world and how
they eat clams and how they they feed.
And, and this is, it was fascinating.
I was, you know, you're excited to do it, but the whole time
you're like, I'm going to die, I'm going to die if I do this,
I'm not going to come back from this.
And all of a sudden, finally this, this sea ice came into
this Bay where the viz was bad. And just the cooling effect of
the water and all this ice there, it killed the algae bloom
that was going on, all that photosynthesis and the water
cleared up and, and the walrus were in their feeding.
And I jumped in the water one day and I'm down deep.
I went deeper to get to into the Clearwater and I'm at 100 feet
deep and I'm chasing these two big bull walrus and I'm swimming
as hard as I can and I'm just out of breath.
I'm just like burning up and I'm alone and I'm, I'm got my big
housing. I'm I can see these two walrus
in front of me. And in my mind I'm like, I'm
going to fail this story for National Geographic.
This will be the first. I'm not thinking I'm going to
die or this is dangerous. I'm think I'm going to fail and
that's a dangerous place to be. And I also know where and at
that point when I'm already that deprived of, of oxygen, I'm
just, I'm, I'm done. You know, I but I, if you dump
your weight belt, which is what you would do, and you'd probably
survive if it'd been in the open water, but if you dump your
weight belt under ice, you get stuck underneath the ice.
You, you know you're going to be 40 lbs too buoyant at the
surface, so you can't dump your weight belt.
And now I just start going for the surface, you know, I can't
add any air to my thing. I'm already a little bit heavy.
I just start kicking for the surface and I'm like, so I've
always been curious how I'm going to die.
And I'm like, OK, I got it. I now I know and as I'm going
up, I'm getting, you know, lightheaded and just gave me
this gave me the air again. So it's just so funny just
mentally to go down that path of I know how I'm going to die.
And then it's just, I sent the regs out after that, everything
to get serviced. And what they figure was that
ice, there was so much moisture the way we're filling our tanks
in Greenland and a very in, in the evening when it's very
humid, that it was just building up moisture in the tank and ice
formed inside the tank and blocked it.
And so lucky that it formed, blocked it and then released
again. But that was, that was a close
one. I just had another one in
Antarctica where I was diving under an iceberg again, 29°F
water and and just filming and it's all going great.
And all of a sudden I got this free flow from this new
regulator that from Sherwood that they're asking me to test
this new model. The interstatic pressure of that
Reg was so amped up. I should have checked it again,
but it's just blowing cold air into my mouth and by the time I
got to the surface, no big deal. Got up, you know, free flow.
I know how to deal with that hand in my camera.
I pulled that ragged on my mouth and like, like liquid nitrogen,
like this comic steam came out of my mouth and I realized I
couldn't feel my tongue. I couldn't feel any of my teeth.
I'd frozen the entire inside of my mouth.
And from there I had. I was sick for almost a year
just with the with the amount of damage I did to my lungs from
that. Just breathe in that cold, cold
air under high pressure on the dive.
Set the scene and explain what happened when you were filming
breeding elephant seals. Yeah, another one where elephant
seals are again like hippos. They just, they've got really
bad tempers and nobody had filmed breeding elephant seals
underwater in Antarctica. And it's one animal that will
swim up to a Zodiac with 10 guests in it and bite down on
that boat and fling people into the water.
That's happened down there. They have wicked tempers.
And during the breeding season, you've got an 8000 LB animal.
That's an animal that's 18 to 20 feet long.
It weighs as much as an F-350 pickup truck.
And he's got teeth that are 5 inches long.
And he's got a bad personality. And generally they're pretty
nice, but they're they're during the breeding season, they're
either going to kill you or breed you.
And I thought, I still need to get an underwater pitcher of a
big adult male elephant seal. And I swam.
So all that considered, you're like.
All that considered, I'm like finally we had clear viz.
I could see an elephant seal in the water.
The mistake I made is I didn't realize that it was the dominant
breeding bull that he was going to kill and attack any other
male elephant sealed or any other threat that came to his
harem of 300 females that he was breeding.
We saw other males drown and kill females in the surf zone,
breeding them in the surf because they're, and these are
1500 LB females that they're drowning by.
But just getting on top of them and trying to breed them, the
Searle horned up to pass on their genetics that, you know,
all that factored, I still jumped in the water and I swam
up to this big bowl and I'm alone.
My assistant is down the beach and I'm swimming up to this
bowl. And right away he sees me and I
I saw a boulder. I was nervous.
My heart's pounding. I'm like, you know, again, this
is a bad idea. If you do this, you're going to
die. But I'm going to ignore that
because it's I've survived every other time I went up behind a
big boulder. It's only four feet deep and
this boulders almost to the surface.
So I'm I'm with this boulder hiding behind it.
And he sees me. His eyes are this big and he
shoots straight over to me. And here comes this 18 foot long
8000 LB dominant breeding elephant seal.
And I'm just like, oh. And as he came so fast, he came
right around the rock. I now have nothing between US
and he rears up and I'm down in four feet of water on my back
and he's coming up on top of me. And his head's probably, you
know, 3 / 3 feet wide. And he lunges at me in this head
and I'm looking in his mouth. And as he tries to bite down on
me, all I can do is shove my Dome inside his mouth and I can
see his big teeth and he's trying to bite me.
He's trying to crush me and every time he tried to lunge on
top of me, all I could do to push off him was to get my Dome
in his mouth and push off him and push off.
So I kept pushing away from him as he's trying to bite me and
crush me. And then I started to get closer
to the shore. Now I'm in three feet of water.
I tried to stand up so I could, you know, flip fins on.
I can't stop to do anything. And every time he hit me, I was
just like the force of hit. When him hit was just the bang
and and I got now I stand up and when as I stood up, he saw that
as a challenge. When they fight, they rear up to
a 10 feet high in the air, these males and they slam their chest
together like thousands of pounds of force.
He reared up to 10 feet high and just threw himself at me.
And I just got out of the way of that and I started, you know,
my, I was like, I was screaming like, boom, take another hit
from him. Finally my, my guy I'm working
with. So I was in trouble and he came
running down the beach and he distracted.
He just came out and just waving at it turned on him for a second
and I crawled out of the beach and just again, bad decision.
My fault. Not, not the fault of the
elephants. He'll just I made a stupid
decision and it almost cost me, but I got in the water with
another breeding bull after that and I got his picture.
So it was good. To what extent do you think when
your time comes it ends up being on a shoot?
Yeah, I, I, I just somehow feel like I've all the 20 lives that
I've burned up. I feel like, you know, I'm not.
I wouldn't again say I'm invincible, but I'm to a point
where I've reeled myself in a bit and I feel like I'm good to
go. You know?
I don't think it's going to happen.
I'm more scared being in a car on a highway.
There are enough people in the world who are on.
I've almost been hit by a semi when I'm riding my road bike,
you know, on a highway or I feel like my time.
Unfortunately, I just, I'm not scared of death.
I just don't want to die in a car, you know, bleeding out with
the jaws of life going and just because some drunk driver hit me
or somebody was texting or, you know, I mean, if I die doing
what I love doing, then then so be it.
You know, it's, it's the journey I'm on and there's urgency to
the stories that I'm telling. And and death, the fear of death
doesn't factor into my into my world, But at the same time, I
know that I need to stay alive if I'm going to keep telling
these stories. I want to run through a few of
your notable shoots, the first one being the polar bear through
the window photograph. How did that happen?
Oh, I was working as Svalbard, Norway.
And, you know, through the climate change we had for had to
put the story on hold for a few years.
You know, historically there's ice surrounding Svalbard.
And for the few years, just due the lack of loss of ice and
warming temperatures, there was no ice.
And so we kept putting it on hold.
And finally I found a guy that I could work with, Carl Eric
Gilson. And we agreed to go out on our
snowmobiles and try and document polar bears, but we were having
a hard time finding them because there was no sea ice.
There was just this little strip along land and we were sitting
out a Blizzard in this little cabin and we played a lot of
Yahtzee and we were just hanging out and, you know, waiting for
the the weather to improve. And all of a sudden I looked up
and there's this polar bear staring at me through the
window. But it was an image I wanted to
make. It was one I was excited when I
had sketched out. I mean, these bears, when
they're hungry, they get into trouble.
They come into contact with man, they get killed, they get shot,
they don't come off the quota. I wanted to show in one image
and tell a story that these animals are coming into contact
with humans at night. So all of a sudden, here's this
moment. The bear is looking at me
through the window, but the window's kind of dirty.
It's iced up. So I opened up the window and
all of a sudden I'm sitting here 2 feet away from this female
polar bear and she's beautiful and she's looking at me and I,
I, But I realized I couldn't. Her face was too much in shadow.
It was so bright behind her and there wasn't enough light coming
out of this dark dingy cabin. And I all I had to put light on
her face was I grabbed my laptop computer, which luckily had a
little bit of battery left and had put it onto a white screen.
And I was holding it up about, you know, a foot from her face
with a wide angle lens. And I kept trying to fill in the
shadows. And as she's just looking at me
through this open window and also hoping that she's not going
to come into the cabin because obviously she's hungry and she's
smelling the smells of our food. And she didn't she was great.
Got a picture of her and she just went on, went on her way.
And that was the situation where my friend, that was Carl Eric,
who a few days later died when he went through the sea ice, you
know, so it's. Yeah, but the polar bear could
have gone through. I think she could have made her
way through and she tried to meet me at the I went out at one
point to go grab a flash to try and pump some light into her
face and she met me at the door and I was like, well that's a
bad idea. So I shut the door again and you
know, generally I've seen 3000 polar bears, I've seen 2000
grizzly bears and 1000 black bears.
And you know, I've never once had this moment where I was this
bear was out to eat me or kill me.
I mean, they're these completely misunderstood top predators that
are just out out there trying to scratch out a living.
And I'm always trying to give them that fair representation.
What did you know about leopard seals going into your famous
shoot and what ended up happening?
You know, I, I didn't know much about him.
I, I had put in to do a story for National Geographic on
leopard seals. And it took a long time to get
the first things to come together for me to find a boat
that I could go to Antarctica with.
And I, you know, consulted this, this gentleman by the name of
Jordan Elma from Sweden, who's this guy who makes dry suits.
And now he makes my dry suits. He's a, he is a wonderful
filmmaker, worked for BBC for many years.
And now he was just making dry suits.
And I said, hey, do you want to sort of get back in the game and
come out of retirement here or, you know, change, get back into
the field with me? And he's like, he agreed to do
it. He had met the leopard seal.
He said it can be extremely intimidating.
And, and I said, I want to do a story and just dispel the myth
of this misunderstood predator in Antarctica if we're going to
get people to care about climate change and habitat.
And, and right when Geographic approved the story, tragically
in 2004, a scientist was killed by a leopard seal, taken down
and drowned. And, and, and the world was
like, OK, see, they are these vicious animals.
And I was like, I got to do this.
I got to dispel this myth. And we arrived in Antarctica.
It was a five day crossing in the roughest seas in the world.
Actually, a seven day crossing. How was that?
It was beautiful, beautiful. It was brutal.
It was vomiting almost nonstop for the first three days to the
point that I thought I might not make it that my diaphragm was
was I was was in contraction just from from vomiting so much
nonstop with no food or water. I mean just it's so rough being
in in 20 foot seas and the bow of a little sailboat going up
and down and getting smacked in 50 knots of wind and it was
dangerous to get out of bed. I was always getting thrown out
of bed into the wall. You croc crawl back into bed.
Just kept puking into my pillow. When you say you thought you
might not make it, meaning what? That you.
Just yeah, just going to suffocate.
I mean, I don't know. I didn't, I'm not a doctor.
I don't know much about it. But when you are, when you're
vomiting is goes like, you know, and you're just driving like
that for hour after hour. It is so brutal that it's, it
becomes scary. You feel like you're suffocating
and, and just trying to deal with that.
But luckily after three days, the storm subsided and I was
able to get some food in and, and, and, and eat some apples
and some water. And we get there after a week at
sea and we put the Zodiac in the water and we go around the
corner. And I've never seen a leopard
seal before. But this huge female came up to
the boat and her head's bigger than a grizzly bears and she's
12 feet long and we're in a 12 foot Zodiac and she's as bigger,
bigger than our boat. And she goes off and grabs a
Penguin and she comes up underneath the hull of the boat
and we're just sitting there and she starts to ram this Penguin
against the hull of the boat and she's interacting with her.
So he and I sit down and we brace ourselves because we don't
want to fall in the water. And I'm looking at this huge
seal and then she goes 15 feet away from the boat.
She grabs it and they do this this death shake.
She shakes it by the head so fast you can hardly see.
There's water flying everywhere. This explodes, and all of a
sudden there's chunks of meat, and she shakes it so hard she
uses centrifugal force to turn the Penguin inside out.
And so now the skin's off the meat.
And now there's just blood and guts in the water, and she's
eating this Penguin. And that's when you had on said
to me, this is a good seal. It's time for you to get in the
water. Yeah.
And I'm like, forget that. Except I said that everything in
my body is like, do not do this. And so he and I started to
fight. He's like, listen, you told me
not enough budget, not enough time, and you had to tell this
story in your career at National graphic Bop bop bop ball talk.
Now you shut up and you get in the water.
I've given you your seal. Here is your seal.
And I'm like, you kidding me? I said.
So I put on my dry suit and I you ever almost.
That convinced. You.
Yeah. Yeah.
I was like, he's right. You know, I've made these
promises and they accepted my proposal and I'm here to get in
the water. The frigging leopard seals.
Let's get on with the show, buddy, and put my snorkel in my
mouth and I slipped over the edge of the boat.
And I mean, objects appear 30% larger underwater than they do
above water. So forever how big she looked.
She was massive and she dropped her Penguin.
She came racing over to me. It's just this massive head.
And she starts doing these lunges at me, these threat
displays. And Yodan had prepped me and
said that these seals can do that.
They'll do these cobra like strikes at you.
So she starts doing this and I'm staring down her throat as she's
doing this. But Yodan had told me something
funny before I went to the water.
He goes, listen, if you get really scared, you just close
your eyes and she'll go away. Yeah, but he also said that she
was going to do this and she would probably relax.
And so I'm putting my strobes on half power.
I'm thinking F eight, 160th of a second, you know, depth of
field, get the shot, get your focus right.
This is happening as I'm staring into the mouth of the seal where
hurricane eyes are here and here and I'm staring in her mouth and
she's doing this. And I just started shooting,
shooting, shooting. And after about 5 minutes of her
doing this, you know, whatever, maybe maybe it wasn't 5 minutes,
maybe it was 20 seconds, I don't know.
But she did a bunch of these threat displays, got her
Penguin, came back and did more. And she's the most dominant, the
biggest leopard seal in this entire area of all.
All the other leopard seals were staying out of her way.
She had the prime feeding spot. And here I just jumped on her
into her habitat and she does these displays and then she
relaxes and she disappears. And I'm thinking the encounter
must be over. I don't know what's going on
next. She comes back with another
Penguin and she holds it by its feet and the Penguins trying to
get away from her and this fresh caught Penguin and she lines it
up with me and she lets it go and the Penguin swims over my
shoulder and she goes off and grabs it and she comes back and
does it again and again and again.
I'm like, is she trying to offer me a Penguin now?
Like this is just too much, like my emotions going through my
body at this time. We're just like, are you kidding
me? And I keep photographing.
She does it again, again. And then she realizes that I
think she realizes at this point that I can't catch a live
swimming Penguin. So she grabs another Penguin and
she gets it tired, she gets it worn out and she tries to offer
me that Penguin. And then ultimately she started
to bring me dead Penguins. At one point I had five dead
Penguins floating around my head with her just sitting there.
And this, this, I'm telling you the stories, if it all happened
in a minute, it happened over 4 days.
I mean, every time I got in the water, she was there to greet us
and greet me with a Penguin and was determined to get me to eat
a Penguin at once. She rammed my Dome underwater
incredibly hard. I think that there was so much
blood in the water and the Penguins and she's eating it and
I'm this far from all sudden my Dome is touching her lips in the
water. She Rams the camera thinking
maybe it was another leopard seal.
Another time she flung a Penguin through the air and I'm in the
water like for me to you like this and you're the leopard
seal. She flings the Penguin, which
weighs 10 lbs, drills me into the side of the head and I felt
myself almost getting knocked out.
I was like, bang. And I feel myself sort of
closing down. And I'm like, and you just see
her change her body language. She starts to watch me like this
as you become weak. And I'm like, you hang on to
this buddy. And I'm like brought myself like
pretended I was good until I was good.
Kept shooting just all these inner things.
And then she'd come up to me and she'd blow bubbles in my face
like frustrated that I couldn't accept the Penguin.
And this all this craziness happened and and then on the 4th
day, I'm thinking she's really sick of me now because I've
shown my complete ineptness. I can't catch or eat a Penguin.
I don't accept her offering. She doesn't know why I'm in the
water. She's trying to figure it out by
trying to offer me, give me to accept, get to get me to accept
the Penguin. And then she looks at me and she
rolls over on her back and she does this guttural deep
jackhammer sound that's it vibrates through my whole body.
I didn't even know they vocalized like this.
And I'm like OK, now I'm going to get it.
Now she's upset and she looked at me and as she did that, she
rushed towards me and I'm like, I'm about to get hit.
And she rushed right by me. And as she did that, I looked
and there was another big leopard seal had stuck up behind
me. And that whole threat display
was for this other big leopard seal who happened to have a
Penguin in its mouth. She chased it out of the
visibility barrier. I could see them take off
together. She grabbed its Penguin.
I'm assuming it grabbed his Penguin because it came back
immediately with another Penguin in its mouth and offered me that
Penguin as well. And I was just like, are you
kidding me? It's like it's, it's the most
incredible story. I think it's the most incredible
thing that will ever happen to me in my career.
Where you go from imagine a polar bear taking you under its
wing and trying to feed you seals, you know, or a grizzly
bear sitting with you all day long trying to get you to accept
the salmon. It just doesn't happen.
And and to go to just meet this vicious predator, to have it
nurture me, take care of me, try and feed me, trying to figure me
out in its world and and to come back with a set of pictures to
this day that I'll never duplicate.
And it was, you know, it was, it's supposed to be the hardest
assignment of my life. And it was the easiest.
I mean, I shot that entire assignment in five, the first
five days. You talk about 8 years to get A2
good hours with narwhals for the first five days.
I, I shot the best story of my life.
And and it's because of this leopard seal.
Likelihood something in your career like that could ever
happen again. I mean, to the point where, you
know, with a spirit bear here in the Great Bear Rainforest of, of
you know, here we are in Hartley Bay and looking for spirit bears
where I've had a Big Bear took me a long time.
But this big male bear who's in a different Creek system around
here, you know, came down to the Creek and I spent two days with
that, walking with him through the forest and he went and slept
under a tree and I slept under a tree next to him and just hung
out with him and took his pictures for two days straight.
You know, that was that was powerful, but but never but you
know, that was more of an encounter of you're a family in
the wall. It's letting you into its world.
You're a ghost. You're basically non existent to
him and but he's accepted you because he allows you to be two
feet away from him. That was powerful, but to have a
top predator force feeding you is, well, I don't think ever
happened again. Tell about accompanying Narwhal
hunters and how you were conflicted with telling that
story. That's, that's a that's the
hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life.
That's the hardest story I've ever had to do.
The, the Inuit are my many ways, my protectors, my friends, my
people who I grew up with, who I look up to deeply.
And, and I'm out on the sea ice with them living with the Inuit
for, for many years. And, and I'm witnessing this
hunt over the years. I'm witnessing this hunt that is
so out of control where it went from this meat survival eat for
the community to basically a modern day ivory trade and where
you have 14 year old kids with high-powered rifles smoke in
every whale that goes by hoping that they're going to get it.
And when you start to look at the science that there's a 5 to
1 sink ratio, that five whales are being shot and sunk and lost
for each one that they get, aerial studies have been done
that show 80% of them have at least one bullet hole wound.
And when I have my own aerial pictures of narwhals with seven
bullet holes in them, when I'm watching a grumpy hunter blow
the head off a baby narwhal because he's in a bad mood and
watch it sink. When I watched another hunter
out there who got a female and she's pregnant and she's
floating there and he doesn't want it to come off the quota.
He wants the male to get the Tusk.
He punctures her lungs and sinks her under the ice.
You start to see this. It's like, it's like coming to a
place like Hartley Bay where they Revere spirit bears and
grizzly bears and they protect them.
Imagine if somebody, a few hunters started, you know,
killing them for their paws, you know, to make ashtrays.
You of course you would speak up about it.
And, you know, but at the same time, these people are not bad
people. They're not evil people.
They're just people trying to scratch out a living, you know,
the, the, the government, the way it's all it's, you know,
it's just this dysfunctional system and they're trying to
make money, you know, and here's a way to make money.
If they can get 1000 bucks for a narwhal test, they're going to
go after it. But killing a narwhal is, is
very, very difficult. Only the really exceptional
hunters can do it on a regular basis without a lot of waste.
It's all these young people coming up.
And I talked to you know, what about it?
I did interviews, I went and talked to fisheries in Oceans
Canada about it and they said, no, it's, it's fine.
It's a well managed hunt and all things considered, it's just
fine. Nobody wanted to touch it.
And so after witnessing this for eight years, watching, you know,
being in the water with, with baby narwhals while the mum's
bleeding out to death, that's, you know, way offshore, watching
her die a slow death. And a friend of mine watched
this female who was killed and all the males came together and
lifted to the surface on her toss.
It's just like, you know, at some point I, I went to my
editor and asked geographic. I told him the whole thing.
He said, well, do you want to do the story now or do you want to
do it when they're all gone? It's, it's your choice.
And I'm like, you know, I'm, I'm going to go do this.
And, and I, it was just such a sickening feeling.
I would. Sort of cry myself to sleep
every night in my tent witnessing the slaughter of the
animals that I loved and, and also the people that I loved.
And even halfway through the story, the Inuit in Arctic Bay
started to figure out what I was up to, you know, and because the
questioning I was asking and without even asking me, they
called the my community where I grew up in Lake Harbor with the
Inuit. And they said, Paul Nicklin, we
think he's doing an expose on our hunting culture.
And like, I was the only one who had access to this.
No other film crew could go in and witness this.
And because I spoke a bit of the language and, you know, I've
been with some friends from so many years and the people I grew
up with said, no, Paul would never do anything bad for the
end of it. He would never say anything bad
the end of it. You're you're either with
Greenpeace or you love them and their case.
Like he's, he loves us. So therefore he could never do
anything bad for us. And so to have their trust and
to use that in in many ways to, you know, through their eyes,
fry them, you know, to burn them with this this coverage.
But in the end, I'm like the end.
I would have a voice. Politicians have a voice.
You know, everybody has a voice. These narwhals do not have a
voice. And I'm watching them get
slaughtered. It's like seeing thousands of
elephants left dead, you know, on the planes, you know, with
just their toss taken. And I just in the end, I did it.
I went ahead and did it. And it was just the worst, worst
experience of my life to the point that I was, I was just
absolutely, you know, nauseous, sick about it.
And I released it and, and we thought there would be a storm
over the story and it was way worse than we ever thought.
Like it really how so? Just upset the communities, just
upset the hunters, upset the people.
They're still upset. I mean, I still have many
friends in the Arctic and I still have very, a lot of my
closest friends live in the North and, and we stay in touch.
But the they're also a lot of hunters who are still upset.
They're just betrayed their trust, you know, and I'd
probably do it again. You know, it banned the export
of ivory from Canada for a couple of years.
But now it's in full swing again.
It's still back to it. There's still there's the hunt
still continues. You know, it's all in a
community that gets quoted as 150 narwhals.
They'll be killing six or 700 narwhals just to get their
quota. And that much waste and sinking
continues. And Fisheries and Oceans in
Canada, to me is one of the most corrupt organizations in Canada.
And they not only protect this hunt, it's their mandate to
manage this hunt, but they, they will lie and protect it to the
point that, I mean, they do not want to deal with the cultural
fallout of shutting down this hunt.
So they, they're going to allow it to continue.
And not only that, they're going to protect it and, and protect
it from the world's eyes. And as journalists, this is what
we do. You said you thought you failed
that assignment. How so?
I failed in that. All I wanted with that
assignment was to wake up the Canadian government to manage
narwhals better. To to, of course you don't need
to hunt. Of course they need to live off
the land. They need to eat meat, you know.
But when the Canadian government allows these hunters to shoot
these animals and they take the Tusk and they take the skin and
they leave 3000 lbs of meat rotting on the ice and there's a
5 to 1 sink ratio. And for the government to say
it's more like a a 2 to one ratio and that's acceptable.
I find that such a gross mismanagement of as an animal in
a population, in a species, that I don't blame the Inuit.
I don't see the Inuit as doing anything wrong.
It's like when you allow your kids to go outside every night
and get into trouble and, you know, get into drugs and do
things wrong and you never scold them or give them any, you know,
and, and, and yet you say you're the parent or you're protecting
them, but you're not. Then all of a sudden things get
a lot worse. So in a sense, I failed because
all I did was really upset the intimate.
And the intimate came out of this looking bad.
And the government hardly got mentioned.
The government can defend themselves.
You know, they're very articulate and they're used to
being a bunch of politicians and they can, you know, worm their
way out of anything. Whereas the, you know, it just
came out and just like with egg on their face in this.
And and that was never my intention.
You know, my intention was to wake up the government to all of
a sudden find a happy solution to this hunt.
And I thought I found the formula of doing an expose
undercover thing and I just really hurt a lot of my friends.
And the hunt continues today. So I've failed deeply.
Most satisfying moment from your career would be what?
I think finally, after eight years of with narwhals, to
finally be in the water with them and have a group of, you
know, 12 male narwhals which I had been pursuing for all these
years, come by right next to me. That was very, very gratifying
moment. You know that's but it's not
even that it's the biggest ones are the biggest most satisfying
moments are now when after it's sort of the fruits of all this
work. When you get an announcement
here in Hartley Bay with the First Nations that they've
canceled the gate Northern Gateway pipeline of running 300
big oil tankers through this habitat every year.
Knowing that there you know, deforestation has been greatly
reeled in here banning death Nets off the coast of
California, these big drift Nets that kill randomly.
Those are the victories that that mean everything to me.
The awards, the the accolades, the all of it.
It's just, it's just a small miss, small affirmation or but
the the big wins are these, these these victories of
protecting habitats and species. How do you find the balance
between being a photojournalist and conservationist?
It's so funny, I went on this journey of being a scientist to
a pretty picture photographer is so science left me feeling
empty, so excited to be a pretty picture photographer and just to
see my images published in magazines that I started to feel
very empty very quickly in doing that.
And then from there to become a National Geographic
photojournalist. That was really exciting for
about 10 years. And I'm like, I need to do more.
And you know, National Geographic is amazing, but to
have to work for two years on a major project and to have 12
images published in a magazine that are there for one month and
gone forever after that. Meanwhile I'm on the next story.
I would rather take, you know, work with a small team, roduce
the work and right away you might be on an assignment for
only a week and then pump those images into our blueprint, into
our circle of success, that sea legacy and have conservation
wins. And that excites me a lot more.
So now I'm fueled by what's the outcome.
We need to say this. We need to have a conservation
win. That's what fuels me now.
You a while back pitched your Nat Geo editors about making an
emotional plea to your readers. Take me into the room and the
conversation that took place around that.
All the stories I've been doing for National Geographic were
based on hardcore science. You know, I've still had that
science background behind me. I was young and, and, and I
said, look at, can I just try a new formula?
Can I write a story for National Geographic?
Photographers never, almost almost never get to write
National Geographic. I said, let me write a story.
Let me photograph it. Let me do an emotional plea to
the readers. Let people understand that, that
the ice in the Arctic is like the soil in a garden, that when,
when the ice disappears, that this, this ecosystem will
collapse. And let me connect the dots for
people. Let me talk about photosynthesis
and phytoplankton and zooplankton and, and the polar
cod and the seals that eat the polar cod, the beluga whales and
the narwhals. And at the top of the food chain
is is polar bears and how all these species depend on sea ice.
And as we see sea ice disappearing, obviously science
isn't getting done getting it done.
What's going to happen when we lose ice?
And I said, can I write and can I photograph it?
And they're like, yeah, it's not what we normally do around here.
Photographers photograph and writers write.
And I'm like, let me try it. And so they did.
And, and we were shocked that it was not only the number one
story of the year, but it had the highest readership score of
any story over the previous 14 years.
And I was just like, that's what first set me off down the path
of the importance of breaking down the walls of apathy,
creating that emotional connection through storytelling
and not just being this sort of old school, dry, unbiased
journalism. You know, it was basically a
plea and, and whether it made a big difference or not, I don't
know. But obviously it resonated with
people. How did your idea for a
nonprofit come about? My idea for a nonprofit was very
simple in that my partner, Christina Mittemeyer originally
has started an organization called the International League
of Conservation Photographers. She took the world's best
photographers. She got them working for her for
free on the biggest conservation issues facing us today.
She had conservation wins, and it just became too big and too
much to handle. And as we saw everywhere we go
in the world, we see problems with our oceans.
And we said, you know, taking on the whole planet is massive.
There's already thousands of nonprofits doing conservation
work. Let's focus on the oceans.
Obviously, the oceans are the lungs of our planet.
Every second breath we take comes from the sea.
When you see that 95% of the big fish are gone, when you see
problems like these death Nets, when you see overfishing, you
see places like Hartley Bay. We are now where they have no
fish left. The herring, the herring and the
salmon are pretty much gone. You feel this urgency to the
work you need to do. And we have found a blueprint
for success where all you have to do is use your camera by the
best visual storytellers in the world, shooting video and
pictures, forcing political decisions, putting these images
in front of the international court of public opinion.
We said let's start, see legacy. And it all began in Svalbard,
Norway, when I was on the shores and I went to take a wealthy
tourist to go see polar bears. And we went back to Svalbard, to
places that I knew well where I could find bears to show them
and to show the bears to her. And there was no ice around and
we weren't finding any bears. But we ended up finding 2 dead
bears on that trip, two young, looked like 2 1/2 year old
siblings that had starved to death, and they're just lying
there with no ice around. And I was like, science isn't
getting it done. You know, it's, you look in the
newspaper, we know about climate change.
All the science is in, you know, anybody who's got half a brain
understands that this is the biggest problem facing us as a
species today. And, and it was like, we need to
beat the head over the world with this stuff.
We need to connect the word emotionally.
We need to break down the walls of apathy.
And that's going to happen through visual storytelling,
where we work with the top scientists.
We base our imagery on science, but you have to shoot those
artistic, powerful images to start the conversation.
And that's when we began Sea Legacy four years ago.
Explain the projects that you're currently taking on through Sea
Legacy. Well, Sea Legacy, we look for
where we can make a difference, where we can have impact by
bringing in our, our visual storytelling team.
So we look for tipping points. We, we base it on science.
We talk to the scientists, we see where the biggest issues
facing our planet are today. We look where we can drive
change. So we look for these tipping
points. And then from there we put
together a visual storytelling expeditions.
We go on expedition, we gather the assets and from there we
have our campaign team that run with these visuals through
social media, through television, through big
political pushes. And then from there we, we work
towards solutions. And then from there we film our
solutions and we create this nice little feedback loop.
And we're actually having victories and wins.
And it's, it's a powerful thing when you can, all you have to do
is use your camera, put these issues in front of an
international court of public opinion, get the world wing in
on it. And politicians listen when you
get 220,000 signatures on an issue and and people start to
speak their mind. What are some of the wins you've
had? Well, one of the big wins is
right here. We're so excited to be back here
in Hartley Bay. We came here in 2010 when the
Northern Gateway pipeline from Enbridge from the tar sands was
being pushed through this territory to Kitimat to this
coast for 300 oil tankers, 10 times bigger than the Exxon
Valdez. We're going to come through
these very, very rich, nutrient rich waters year round with some
of the dirtiest oil in the world on board and working with the
First Nations using our our images, doing a major cover
feature for National Geographic magazine on the spirit bear and
getting another 20 pages about the oil industry in a pipeline
through it was called pipeline through Paradise was that story.
So I have an 80 page issue. You know, most people get to say
I had one image in National Geographic.
Well, we had 80 pages out of the 80 pages of the 80 pages, we had
40 pages dedicated to this issue.
And then to just see the efforts of Pacific Wild and other the
nonprofits, every First Nation between here and Alberta came
together to stand in solidarity against this and to eventually
in the courts through pressure to have Enbridge shut down the
Northern Gateway pipeline project through this territory
was just a really beautiful victory.
We're taking on whaling the the the whaling of an endangered fin
whale species in Iceland. We've taken on the drift net
campaign off the coast of California when Californians
have no idea that there's these mile long Nets out there killing
dolphins and whales and seals and sea lions for swordfish
fisheries, which shouldn't be allowed in the 1st place.
So that's another one that we're winning where it's going well.
We've banned the oil and seismic exploration in the fjords of
Norway, northern fjords of Norway where the orcas come to
feed in the winter on herring. It's just one after another and
we we figured out this blueprint, our team is growing
and we're just going to try and mow these down one after
another. What's the blueprint like and
what's the internal conversation that you guys have in
determining whether or not to take on a certain issue or
campaign? The, the, the internal
conversation is what's, what's a massive issue?
Is it shark finning? Is it, you know, and, and can we
use our voice? We have a collectively a massive
social media following. We have something called the
Swell where celebrities come in and lend their voice to our
causes. We have the collective.
We're the best photographers are part of this journey.
They're part of our team. And we've got scientists and
advisors who help us and steer us.
And we have a compass of really knowledgeable, passionate people
who help give us direction. And when we collectively come
together and we say we can make a difference on this, we can
work with other NGOs, work with the scientists, work with other
agencies. We can combined efforts like
something like the Death Net campaign.
Another organization, Mercy for Animals, had a secret observer
on one of the boats who was actually sitting there with
undercover cameras filming the killing of dolphins and sharks
and these different species on these boats and the bycatch and
the illegal behavior on these boats.
And that's just powerful when you can come together.
And then we can use our big social media channel.
We have access to 150 million people every day that we can put
these important issues in front of.
And we put it in front of a global audience and let the
world weigh in on this stuff. And then from there, we we give
people a path, a direction, a place that they can express
themselves, whether it's writing a letter, signing a petition,
whether they're voting or stopping to eat Atlantic salmon
or whatever it is. We give them a solution to the
problem and then from there. So that's the blueprint
basically. What are your long term goals
with Sea Legacy? Long term goals are to save the
oceans, you know, to it's without our oceans, we're going
to disappear as a species ourselves.
It's, it's to really take on the big issues, whether it's climate
change, overfishing, you know, from the Atlantic salmon, fish
farms in our waters, whatever it is, is to, is to basically
protect our oceans, create marine protected areas, have
them protected, have them in forest.
You know, that's one thing to deal with overfishing in
critical habitat to protect everything from, you know, we
call it sea to sky protection, flow from the rainforest to the
bottom of the sea, from ocean dragging, bottom dragging to
illegal fishing practices. Just a poor management to hold
fisheries and oceans accountable to help hold Justin Trudeau to
his target of protecting 20% of marine protected areas by 2020.
When you think of, you know, 13% of some land areas and countries
are protected. You come to the oceans, less
than 1% are protected. You know, we need to get that
number up. 1% of the most critical habitat in the world
isn't protected. We need to bring the not
everyone's going to get to see the oceans.
We need to bring the oceans to everyone.
And that's only going to happen using our cameras.
How is the work you're doing to build Sea Legacy impacted your
ability to do for profit work? It's been a very interesting
journey. I I never thought I would arrive
at this point, but where it's become such a selfless pursuit
where I'm for the last five years, I've been pouring my own
personal resources into growing sea legacy.
Christina's been doing that. We still don't collect a wage
and, and yet we're starting to raise significant funding.
And at some point when you're turning down paid work, you're
turning down assignments with National Geographic, you're
turning down lectures and appearance fees because you want
to keep growing this conservation movement.
With some point, this business model is going to fail when you
keep spending tons of money on something, trying to grow it
and, and then not not paying yourself.
So it's, it's we're, we're building a team around myself as
well to keep growing my own brand and business and as well
as as growing Sea Legacy. But Sea Legacy is first and
foremost for us. How do you think it's impacted
you financially? Just spending a lot of money and
not making any after a while, you know, but I'm at AI was at a
point, you know, 3-4 years ago where I could have retired and
it was at that point that was it was scary like retire.
Why I'm, I've got 30 years left in this body to go out and crush
it and grind it out and get these visual assets and lead
these people lead these storytellers.
I would care less if I woke up half broke tomorrow.
Just, you know, as long as I have enough to to survive and
and to keep leading the charge with this was with this team of
passionate people. It's it's fine.
Money will come. I've never worried about money.
It's never been a factor in my life that I have to have money.
I just want to have conservation wins.
How does that process been for you though, in figuring out the
balance between the nonprofit work, this, you know, the great
sea legacy that you're trying to build up and the for profit work
that you'd also like to continue doing?
Yeah. You know, the the for profit
work is is it's for profit. And I mean, the only thing, the
only for profit work, I would much rather rather than say, get
paid an extreme amount of money to do a public, you know, talk
and get paid $100,000 or to make an appearance if it's to the
wrong audience. I'd much rather speak for free
at say Davos or on the Ted stage or the World Economic Forum or
to United Nations. I'd much rather speak at all
those venues for free then. And so I just need to find a way
to make that work. How do you do that?
I just think you do much fewer talks and you get paid a lot
more to do it. Or, you know, we're finding ways
to grow our social media to the using our social.
Someone just paid me $22,000 to put a little story on my feet.
You know, now if I can have this machine working behind me while
I'm out doing the work that's important to me, then we have
found the perfect balance. Someone just made an anonymous
simulation to see Legacy for 400 thousand U.S. dollars to set
Christina and I free. Like don't worry about making
money. Go go out there and do your
work. Get out there on the front
lines, lead your team. And it was like that's it's a
nice, it's a beautiful, beautiful gesture.
It's a nice surprise. So the money is going to come.
We're not worried about that. What I'm really proud of with C
Legacy is that we started something called the the Tide,
which is people are anywhere from $1.00 to $5000 a month.
People are making these donations and we're trying to
grow that tide where rather than waiting for one corporate
sponsor, big generous donations like that, that we can have 10s
of thousands of people given $10 a month, which will ultimately
turn into millions of dollars a year.
Allowing our team to be out there basically without, without
money being a factor in the work that we do.
Just being autonomous, an autonomous hub of content
creation for conservation wins. And where do people go if they.
They just go to the website seelegacy.org.
You can just join the tide and and by there it's like sort of a
Patreon account or where you get to be part of the journey.
You get to be behind the scenes and get special access to
footage and the work that we're doing.
It's been a model that's that's working.
We just need to grow it. How has social media changed the
game for you? It's, it's been incredible.
You know, I thought it was a joke four years ago when and a
couple friends, my buddy Sam Kretchmar and Jenny Nichols,
both came to me and said, hey, dude, you need to get on
Instagram. I'm like, come on, I'm not going
to. I would not reduce my
photography, you know, which I see as fine art and beautiful or
for magazines into a little wee squares on a you don't really
ever crop your images like that. And why would I do that?
And all of a sudden I put up a couple of posts and I actually
baited people from National Geographic to my feed.
I got 45,000 new followers one day in three hours.
And you know, within a year I'd hit a million followers.
And I was like, whoa. And then when I opened my
gallery in New York, you know, I said, hey guys, come on down to
the gallery and meet me. I'll be here and we can talk
about conservation. And in the 3000, people showed
up and there's a line up around the city block in the rain.
We had to hire a buddy, a guy I know now, Drago from Serbia to
come in as a bouncer to control the crowds.
And people are coming in like crying and hugging and just.
I think people are looking for leadership.
They're looking for guidance, they're looking for direction,
they're looking for hope. And it's it's been become a very
powerful thing for me to realize that there are real passionate,
smart, intellectual people at the other side of those
Instagram followers. It's not just a number of who
has how many followers, it's the engagement that I have with my
audience that I love that I can put up a post and talk about an
issue, have 10,000 comments on one post, that's 10,000
comments. And those are people debating,
discussing, negotiating. I think it's powerful.
And forget how many you know, if you get a million likes on a
post, great. But I care about the engagement,
and that's to have a really engaged audience is important
to. Me, yeah.
Obviously you're putting out great content on your platforms,
but that's not easy to do it on a consistent basis.
What's the process in which you use for deciding what to put
out? Yeah, if you know that people
talk about prepping your posts a year in advance or you know, a
year in about prepping your posts a month in advance, I just
can't work like that. I, I love it.
I'm like, OK, what, what are we in the mood for today and what
do I think? What day is it today?
And you know what's going on at the world today?
And so I'll, I love to try and engage with everyone.
So I'll, I'll, I'll try and ignite, you know, touch people's
nerves or ignite, ignite a conversation.
And, and so I'm always trying to find the perfect picture of the
perfect words. And I love it when I was like,
boom, there it goes. This one's going to go, this
one's going to go crazy. And it's just a good feeling.
Who have you been most surprised has reached out to you through
social media? I mean, when I wake up and I'm
like, my numbers just jump 5 or 10,000 followers without me
doing anything. And I'm looking, I go over to
Leonardo Dicaprio's page and he's just, you know, I don't
know if it's him, but it's his people, I guess.
But they share a lot of content on his feed there, you know, So,
you know, Kelly Slater's writing me and like, how do I get
involved? And it's just like, really.
And Eddie Vedder just invited us to his concert this week because
he cares about the environment and wants to, you know, talk
about sea legacy And then Bride Adams and I are friends through
conservation, you know, So just the people I really respect as
artists, you realize that they're all people who just care
And, and there's just a lot of people are starting to come to
the surface. And your favorite experience
you've had with any of these people that you spend time with?
I just think, you know, one of my favorite ones was just, I
think for all these people, they're so famous, they're so
good at what they do. They're so in the spotlight and
and to just take them and all of a sudden show them something
that they couldn't even fathom ever being like to be.
You know, one of my favorite moments, I was working in
Svalbard, Norway. And my friend Sean Powell and I
were just like living in this dirty little tent.
And it's like wet, wet and we're cold.
And we've been eating freeze dried food for two months.
And I get a phone call from the National Geographic ship and
like, hey, can you come on board tonight?
If we move the ship up the coast, we're here with some
people and can you come out and do a talk?
I'm like, yeah, sure. I need a shower anyway, and I
need this resupply of food. And so we take the Zodiac 150
miles down the coast of Svalbard.
We meet up with the ship. I go shower and I come out to do
a talk. And it's a, you know, it's a
narrow corridors. And we're in the front row is
President Carter, Rosalind Carter, Ted Turner, Larry Page,
Madeleine Albright. And it just sort of each row was
was a Chevy Chase. I mean, just went on and on and
on in the ship. And I'm just like, I haven't
talked to another person except Sean for two months.
And all of a sudden here I am to deliver the keynote that
evening. And it was powerful.
Then the next day to take, you know, President Carter and
Rosalind Carter out in a, in a Zodiac and to show them, show
them walrus. You're up there with walrus and
they're understanding the importance of sea ice and
multiyear ice. And with the loss of ice, it's
going to affect species like walrus.
It's just a very powerful time to spend time like that with
somebody of influence. How do you reconcile when you're
spending time with somebody of influence, you know, and their
desire to help out with the fact that they just flew in on their
private jet or own, you know, a dozen homes around the world?
I mean, I get the same thing as well if I listen to everyone of
my social media followers, I would wear live in a hemp sack.
I would not have a cell phone. I would never have flown in my
life. I would not ever have a vehicle.
I would live on a, you know, a deserted desert island.
But somehow I would still be as effective in the work that I do
in conservation. And this you just have to, of
course, we all have an impact and an imprint on this planet.
My impact or where I've made a difference is by not having
kids, you know, trying to go vegetarian, working closer and
closer to that, you know, just trying to minimize my impact.
But sure, I get on an airplane to go do a conservation project.
I fly with my excess baggage. And so I don't, you know, if Al
Gore is going around the world flying almost daily, doing
lectures on conservation and climate change, then, you know,
sure, you can always shoot the messenger.
You can always find a way to poke holes in people.
But I always try and choose to celebrate the good that they're
doing. Obviously there's a lot that has
to be done to combat climate change, but why do you think the
world pretty much only comes together when they're major
catastrophic events? I just think it's everybody
cares. Everybody's really busy, and you
can't afford to care all the time.
You got to run your business. You got to care about your
family. You got to care.
You know, you got to make money. You got to survive on this
planet. And all of a sudden, when
there's a big disaster, it's like, oh, wait, the whole world
cares about this boom. I'm going to throw some money at
her and make a donation. I'm going to get back to my
life. You know, it's really hard to
wake up every day. And I mean, Al Gore was right
when he said an inconvenient truth.
It is. We know it's there, but it's
super inconvenient to say, hey, you know what, I'm going to
switch my vehicle to electric car.
I'm going to, we're not going to go on holidays this year because
I don't want to take my family and have a massive carbon
footprint. I don't want to build that
second house. Maybe we're not going to have
our 4th kid. We have to stop eating Atlantic
salmon because I hear that's bad.
It's, you know, we're going to it's, it's exhausting to care.
You know, it really is difficult to actually start, you know, to
go into Starbucks every day and you're used to getting your
whatever it is, your mocha frappuccino, you know, in a
plastic glass, your cold iced latte in a plastic glass with a
plastic lid and a plastic straw. Now I'm going to change that,
you know, I'm going to just if you want to, I really warn
people that caring is difficult. But once you start down the path
of opening yourself up to factoring our planet in your
day-to-day decisions, it's it's incredibly rewarding, but it is
it's not easy. How do you view politicians that
are climate change deniers? When I did my first stories for
National Geographic on climate change, not no scientist that I
would work with would go on record and even say that climate
change is real. They didn't feel like they had
the the undeniable data that was in.
And now I can go to any one of those scientists.
So you can talk to any, you know, true authentic scientists
and they'll tell you the same thing, you know, that it's the
biggest problem facing us as a species today.
So I don't when the deniers are out there, of course they're
going to take that stand. But they're becoming the
minority very quickly and I'm not too worried about them.
You said we'd be done if President Trump was elected.
I always find a silver lining and everything, and obviously
Trump is terrible for the planet, but I think the silver
lining and Trump is that he has, you know, if Hillary Clinton had
gotten in or Bernie Sanders had gotten in, the whole world would
stay relaxed and say, you know what, The leadership is there.
We do just go on about our lives and let's not worry about this
stuff because the government's got it handled.
At some point, the world had to wake up and take the just
day-to-day decisions and hold themselves accountable in the
lives that we're leading on on this earth and the impact we're
having on this planet. And I think Trump has done that.
He is woken up. The planet when he came in and
you see the destruction that he is causing by dismantling the
EPA, opening up like Bears Ears National Monument, the
destruction that he's doing. The world has woken up.
He started a revolution. I think by the time he's done
with his damage, I think the good that's going to come out of
people waking up is a much better win.
What are your thoughts on President Trump's environmental
policies? It's obviously a disaster.
I mean, he's blowing up everything that he can.
I mean, where do you want to begin from the the disregard of
First Nations and, you know, standing rock and pushing
pipelines through First Nations land to, I know, just the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge to climate change to drilling in
the Arctic to, you know, I think one of the bigger ones for me is
drilling in the Arctic. When Obama actually the White
House Oval Office called me one morning and said, hey, Obama
wants to make an announcement to the world about protecting the
North Slope and the Beaufort Sea and banning drilling in the
Arctic and he wants you to release the announcement with
him. I almost cried.
You know, it was such a a compliment from him to to even
reach out and we released this press release together and just
see that all blowing up now because of Trump.
Well, you saw what the BP oil disaster did.
Imagine something in the Arctic under the ice where you couldn't
react to it even as efficiently as you did with BP, which was a
complete disaster. I think that one terrifies me.
I just know how rich that habitat is when you've got
50,000 narwhals and beluga whale population and bowhead whales
and polar bears and all these species and you talk about
people not meeting their, you know, their, their Paris
agreement hitting their climate change targets, their emission
targets. It's just it's it's terrifying,
but not a crazy thing for me is that we're just another species
on this planet. If you know, if all this is
crumbling around us, ultimately we will crumble too.
And in the fact that we can't wake up to that, it's just mind
boggling to me. How would you best explain the
importance of the oceans? Without the oceans, we die
tomorrow. I mean, the oceans are the lungs
of the planet. Every second breath you take
comes from the sea. The ocean is the world's biggest
grocery store. That that bitch is just.
It's amazing how the ocean, when you get out of its way, how
quickly it recovers. It is this over 4 billion years
of evolution to arrive at this perfect ecosystem of, of growing
life. But the, the amount of pressure
that we have put on the oceans in the last two, 300 years, it's
just the fact that it's even existing.
I mean, Christina, my partner was just in Ghana here at last
week filming for Sea Legacy. And they're pulling more plastic
out of the ocean in their Nets than they are fish.
I mean, we've pushed the ocean beyond its breaking point in
most places, and we will see the ocean collapse.
We are already seeing the ocean show signs of collapsing.
When I did the story for National Geographic in this area
on the BLOB, it's where the water has worn over 6° over a
two year period while I photographed ADC otters
breathing their last breath that are dying from paralytic
shellfish poisoning. On the coast of Alaska, we're
finding Dead Sea lions, thousands of dead birds and fish
and even even fin whales and humpbacks whales that are dying
from from toxic algae. So we are seeing the effects.
You know, the ocean is one of these things that when it folds,
it's going to fold quickly and it's going to have immediate
impacts on us. So you you mentioned some of
what you're seeing currently, like what do you expect to
happen to the oceans? Yeah, I mean, I expect to you
when I was worked as a biologist, you know on on
species like the link snowshoe hair cycle, you know, you would
see Bunny rabbits like snowshoe hairs, their populations would
explode to 1000 snowshoe hairs per hectare in the forest.
Like you'd be walking and there'd be snowshoe hairs going
everywhere. And in populations that do that
is our population is done right now when there's a correction in
a population and it's never a 5% correction or a 10% correction.
It's a 98% correction or a 99% correction.
I don't know how our population is going to be get corrected.
But I'm, I'm fearful of what's coming for people if we continue
to, to put this much pressure on on our planet.
And it's, it's, it's, I don't know how it's going to, it's
going to resist or react. And explain the pressure we're
putting on the ocean currently. We are when you think that
almost all the big fish have been removed from the ocean, you
know when when you have wiped out tuna populations and and
this food that we've lived off of.
But now there's so many people demanding food from the oceans.
When you look at this coast right here where we're taking
Atlantic salmon fish farms, again, authorized by Fisheries
and Oceans Canada, and we're putting them on this coastline
of fish, it should not be in these waters.
And you get Piscean riovirus, which is a blood, a blood virus
which is killing the wild salmon.
And as you saw yesterday, standing on the shores of these
rivers, the salmon are gone. That's Sam.
That river we were in yesterday, as Cameron Kill, a friend of
ours here, has told us, or Marvin explained yesterday, any
of these rivers, if you went back 100 years, you'd be able
just to walk across the backs of the salmon while these bears are
trying to are, they're looking at, you know, 20-30 fish in a
Creek. This Creek that we saw yesterday
is doing well compared to all the others.
It might have 1000 fish in it. It should have 60,000 fish in
it. So you think of when the salmon
have collapsed, the herring have collapsed, the water
temperatures are warming and seaweed populations are
collapsing. Seaweed, the big kelp forests
are underwater rainforests that are the safety and the sanctuary
for all these small fish that are part of the Seaco system,
They've all disappeared. We're seeing orchestra orchest
stars, which is the beautiful star.
Our fish that are basically melting.
You see them dying on the rocks because the water is warm and
the amount of pollutions and toxins and plastic that we're
pushing in the ocean. It's just we're hitting at it
from every every level, every angle.
How much of an inability is there to stop the loss of sea
ice? We're going to lose a lot more
sea ice before we ever say it. The only way we can save sea ice
is to reduce carbon emissions. That's it.
Whether it's through the cattle industry is through fossil
fuels. That's where we have to address
it. There's not going to be any
magic cure. People talk about putting a
garden hose in the sky and creating a vapor barrier, a
water, you know, a cloud barrier between the sun and Earth.
I mean, that's, that's an asinine solution.
We're talking about moving to Mars.
You know, let's, let's reduce our carbon footprint on this
planet and let's save ice and save these ecosystems and
ultimately save ourselves. It's pretty simple math.
Early 2000s You go through the Northwest Passage on an ice
breaker. How much different is it today
versus then? You know, when I went through,
we were smashing ice all the time.
We had a Canada's largest ice breaker that was smashing ice
just to get through it. I could hardly sleep.
You know, you're at the water level.
Sounds like someone's beaten on your room with a sledgehammer.
And this is ice. It lives for many years.
Ice. It's up to 10 feet thick.
Well, that ice is all but gone. You know my friend who I'm
working with here, Scott Barnes, he took a little rubber boat
through the Northwest Passage and I said, did you hit any ice?
Oh no, he never saw ice. So a little sailboats are going
through this year. They brought a cruise ship
through the Northwest Passage with 2000 guests on it.
You know, on a ship that can't touch ice or go near ice.
It's that open now. And all of a sudden, rather than
a major alarm bells going off, countries are all talking about
the possibilities for industry, for ship traffic for, you know,
how do we take this to our advantage?
What can we drill? Where can we drill for oil in
this new open frontier? And we have the very, very much
the wrong reaction to the current state of ice in the
Arctic. Explain what happens as we
continue to lose sea ice. As we lose ice, you're losing
the foundation of an ecosystem. It's very much like losing soil
in the garden. You know, like you think without
soil, a garden can't grow. But as you lose ice, you're
losing the foundation of that ecosystem.
So I mean, I've explained this already, but to to put it in a
more succinct way, but what happens with ice in the Arctic?
So in the spring, when the sun returns to the Arctic, you get
obviously photosynthesis, you get algae growing under the
underside of that ice and you start to see already how an
under under an upside down underwater garden is starting to
form. When you get the photosynthesis,
you get the phytoplankton. Then from there you get the
zooplankton, you get the copepods and amphipods, and in
Antarctic it's the exact same thing except you get the krill
there, which is a biomass greater than humans on earth
that feed on all this phytoplankton under the ice.
From there you get the polar cod and other species.
It is a massive biomass that feeds on the zooplankton, and
then you get the seals that feed on the COD.
You get the narwhals and the beluga whales and the seals and
the harp seals and the ring seals, the bearded seals that
are feeding on the COD. Then you've got the polar bears,
obviously they feed on. Then you start to see how all of
this ecosystem, basically when you have no ice, you get very
low production back into that ecosystem.
Ice really is an inverted garden.
How has your ability to photograph polar bears changed
as sea ice reduces? It's just becoming more
difficult. People are the Inuit and a lot
of other people are saying, hey, look at there's more polar bears
than ever because these bears are being forced in communities
or near communities when they're, when you lose ice,
they're ending up with smells around humans and, and, and
coming into conflict with humans.
So it's, you know, but the bears that there's still some house
out there and there's still bears out there, but we are
finding skinnier and skinnier and bears out there, you know,
and it's, it's and I think that's the famous bear that we
filmed recently, the dying polar bear.
We can't prove that that's because of climate change.
We can't prove that that's because of a lack of ice.
But I have found more dead bears that have starved to death.
And again, I don't just go look for my own data set of my own
photographs. And, you know, I go talk to the
scientists when I talk to the scientists in Alaska and they're
saying, yeah, we're finding dead bears that are floating out in
the open ocean. When we're finding bears that
are having to swim over 400 miles to get from ice to land.
That's not how they evolved. You know, they have not evolved.
So what's happening with ice is that it's it's melting earlier
every spring and it's freezing later every fall.
Bears, if they have enough fat, are designed to go for fairly
long periods of a few months without eating.
But imagine now that ice that melts in an area that used to
historically have ice year round is now melting in June and July
and disappearing, and it's not freezing till October.
That bear now has to survive for six months without ice.
Bears are not omnivores. They can't live on vegetation
and seaweed. They must eat meat.
They eat seals. So without ice, bears need ice
in order as a platform to hunt seals.
So it's a, it's very basic math and it's just trying to keep
reminding, using the power of photography to keep reminding
people of this simple math. How did you find the emaciated
bear and describe what you saw? I was on an expedition.
A very generous supporter of Sea Legacy invited us to come up on
his his his boat and show him around the Arctic.
They had just announced that they were going to create a
marine protected area in Lancaster Sound.
I thought, well, let's at least go celebrate that and talk about
the importance of creating marine protected areas.
Celebrate Trudeau's target of creating 10% of marine protected
areas in Canada by 2020. Seemed like a step in the right
direction, but near the end of the expedition, we come around
the corner and we see looked looked like basically snow on
top of a rock. And then as it moved a little
bit, I could see that it was just this emaciated polar bear
draped over a rock. And I called in the sea Legacy
team. So they came up to the north.
We brought all our cinematic equipment and all our gear and
we, you know, all the only thing we could do at this moment of
seeing this bear was was film it.
And so we got in land, on land a long distance away.
And we waited for for hours and waiting to see if the bear was,
you know, dead or going to die or we didn't know what it was
going to do. But it just eventually slowly
woke up and labored to its feet and dragged itself across the
tundra. It looked like The Walking Dead.
And we were hiding in an old Intuit settlement and like a
little outpost camp. And and so we wouldn't be in
view of the bear couldn't see us.
We didn't want to affect its behavior.
And it dragged itself towards a garbage can and was eating an
old foam burnt snowmobile seat or a motorcycle seat and just
salivating. And you could see that he was
not long for this world, hours, maybe days.
And then he ate, didn't get any food there.
And he just slowly walked down to the ocean and got into the
ocean and swam off around an island.
And then, you know, it's yeah, it's just a bit.
We were just the whole team just stood there crying, you know,
just everyone's crying openly. And and then we're just filming
this moment of watching this big dominant male bear drag himself
like that just and you know, when for me, what was important
about that is when scientists say that 30% of the population
of polar bears is going to disappear by the year 2050.
And they're going to disappear as a species.
They'll become extinct the next hundred hundred years plus.
I want people to know that's just not science.
That's just not data points falling off off a piece of
paper. This is what it looks like.
That's all I was trying to say with that video is this is what
a starving polar bear looks like.
If they're dying, ultimately they're going to disappear
because of the lives and the impact that we've had on this
planet. Are you OK with that?
And obviously it brought out the deniers and the haters and the
all the pushback. But there was more good and
positive that came out of it than the negativity.
How tough is it for you to be on the front lines?
Like actually watching having that.
Yeah, I mean, brutal. I mean, I got into this work
because I love these animals. I want to tell their story.
I want to give them a voice. I want to spend time with them.
I want to celebrate them. And and to sit there witnessing
that. And, you know, it's ripping your
heart out and you're you're crying again and you're you're
upset and you're sad and you're also angry and you, you, but you
feel this urgency to the work that you're doing to get this
out in front of the world. And it's also, it's a very scary
time, but it's also it's a very opportunistic time that we have
these new social media channels that not that they're the end
all, but all of a sudden if you can shoot something like that
and through the metrics that we did, we got over 2 billion
views, apparently 2 billion impressions on that video.
And that's powerful. It was the number one climate
change story in the year in 2017.
It was the most viral video in the history of National
Geographic. Christina's picture was one of
the Time magazine's top 10 images of the year.
So, and if we did get 2 billion, if it's not 2 billion, it's a
billion or 700 million, who cares?
It's it's like it did reached a good chunk of the planet.
And that is the power of a camera.
What do you remember seeing from walking the beaches in Mexico?
And sea turtles digging nests. It was amazing.
I, you know, I, I went to this CN Con, which is this beautiful
park in, in Mexico South of Tulum.
And we were sort of seeing so much the destruction to the
beaches and all the resorts in Cancun where they basically have
destroyed all the nesting habitat.
They said, let's just go and be in nature in Mexico.
And so we, we're walking the beach and all of a sudden we see
this path where this turtle has struggled up the beach, crawling
over plastic bottles and old ropes and Nets and where it
decided to, you know, chose to dig its nest and where it was
trying to even get to the sand. It's just move these two
mountains of plastic on the other side of, of where it dug
its nest. And, and then you see it give up
and you see the tracks return to the sea and it couldn't actually
get through the plastic to lay its eggs in, in the sand.
And that's where that turtle was born.
That's where it like these salmon, it returns to its Natal
area to, to, to lay its eggs. And they couldn't even do it
because the amount of plastic and that's in a protected
sanctuary in, in, in Mexico. How would you explain what
disposable plastic is doing? For 15 years or 20 years,
photographers have been photographing albatross that
they go get so much plastic from the sea they feed their chicks
at all their chicks are dying because their bellies are so
full of plastic they can't retain any other food.
And so you see all these carcasses rotting on land and
all that's there is a belly full of plastic.
You know, whales are dying with plastic, plastic in their
bellies on most turtles nowadays that are dead or that they find
sick in the ocean are full of plastic because they're eating
plastic bags that they think there are turtles.
And now they're finding there's so many microplastic and
microfibers in the ocean that are these plastic beads that are
in our drinking water now. And it's like if we always keep
continuing to wake up too late, then ultimately it's going to
catch up to us and it is catching up to us.
And we're like, we're shocked that so many people are dying of
cancer, like as if it's some big surprise.
But when you see the amount of toxins that we put in our body,
when an orca, a killer whale here dies, it becomes a toxic
waste site. It's so full of PCPS.
There's just so many pollutants and contaminants in the ocean.
What recommendations would you have for people in terms of ways
to make easy changes to their lifestyle?
Recommendations are try and become vegetarian or get damn
close to it. Stop eating so much red meat.
Stop eating Atlantic salmon. Stop using plastic.
Stop accepting plastic at any, you know, Starbucks or any at
any coffee shop. Stop using plastic bags.
And I was just in Rwanda and it's 40.
It's a $40,000 fine flying into that country.
If you get caught with any plastic in your luggage, any
plastic bag, it's the cleanest country I've ever been to in my
life. We walk those streets.
It looks like it was just, you know, just air polished that
day. I mean, it's just because they
banned plastic. That's just it.
I mean, you know it, The question is what kind of planet
do you want to leave your for your kids and your grandkids?
I mean, ask yourself that. And maybe some of the changes we
make now have to be hard and for some people to stop using a
plastic cup at Starbucks, that's a hard change for them.
But that should become an easy change.
You know, people should wake up and say, how do I we think about
love, we think about sex, we think about money, we think
about all these things, you know, on a minute by minute
basis. And but very little, we spend
very little time thinking about how do we make this a better
planet, which is our our life. This is our foundation.
This is we're not moving to Mars.
I love Elon Musk, I think he's an amazing guy.
I think he does really cool stuff.
I think he's a genius. But I don't want to move to
Mars. I don't know anybody else who
would want to move to Mars. Here is again, 4 billion years
of evolutionary protection of evolutionary perfection of this
place that has evolved to, to to take care of us, to feed us, to
give us water and air. And we're just beaten down on
it. And at some point, it's just
going to give up. So it's what was the question.
Yeah, recommendations for changes you think people could
make to their. Life, I mean, just you have to,
you have to think every time a people need to be allow
themselves to become aware, they need to allow themselves to
care. Then they need to from there
vote. You know, every time they go to
a basically every time you go to a grocery store and you pull out
your visa to buy something, you're making a major decision.
And whether it's getting beef or getting Atlantic salmon or you
know, from what you put in your mouth, from what you buy, from
what you order in a restaurant, from what you feed your kids,
from what you drive to what you build to live in, you're making
major decisions every time. And we just have to start
factoring the earth. And when you make those
decisions, you have to really think about the impact that
you're having on this planet. And so if you are able to, I
mean, people need to become aware and they need to care.
People let me change that. People need to care and they
need to become aware. They need to educate themselves.
And then from there, you have to ask yourself what you're willing
to do. I mean, how much do you care
about this whole this planet that we all share?
And it's if you can stop eating Atlantic salmon, you know, never
order Atlantic salmon. It's farm raised, it's killing
our oceans. Just stop doing that.
You know, it's, it's plastic. We need to remove plastic from
our day-to-day lives. You know, we need to factor in
the amount of our carbon footprint on this planet from
flying to driving and what we drive to the way we heat our
homes and to just, you know, whether you're going to have
that, that third or fourth kid, you know, if you're like really
on the fence about it, if you factor in the planet, you're not
going to have that third or fourth kid.
That's probably the main, you know, the biggest sacrifice you
can make. And it's I don't know what to
say. You interviewed out now?
I'm I'm good. That gave you some energy.
Cool. Good.
Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Thank you, Sir. To watch highlights of our three
days with Paul Nicklen and Hartley Bay and the Great Bear
Rainforest, head over to youtube.com/graham Bensinger.
And you will also see me basically by myself within arm's
reach of a very, very large bear in the wild.
And it was terrifying, but certainly in experience I'll
never forget. And super grateful for Paul
Nicklin giving us the opportunity to tag along with
him. If you get a chance, give us a
rating and review. Thanks again for listening.