Paul Nicklen: World-Renowned Wildlife Photographer

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.