Forward Progress with Paul Nicklen: A Call to Protect Our Oceans

0:00Hey, it's Graham. It's Thursday and that means we're offering you another positive piece of a past interview. Each week, our team digs through the archives to find our strongest feel-good stories to present to you in podcast form. This week, Paul Nicklin. 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 there are 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've got to run your business. You've got to care about your family.

0:40You've got to care, you know, you've got to make money. You've 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, make a donation, and 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 an 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.

1:08I don't want to build that second house. Maybe we're not going to have our fourth kid. We have to stop eating Atlantic salmon because I hear that's bad. 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 incredibly rewarding, but 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, 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 undeniable data that was in.

1:41And now I can go to any one of those scientists, or you can talk to any true, authentic scientist, and they'll tell you the same thing, 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 in everything and obviously Trump is terrible for the planet, but I think the silver lining in 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 just go on about our lives and let's not worry about this stuff because the government's got it handled.

2:21At some point the world had to wake up and take the day-to-day decisions and hold themselves accountable in the lives that we're leading on this earth and the impact we're having on this planet. And I think Trump has done that. He has 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.

2:52What 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 disregard of First Nations and, you know, Standing Rock and pushing pipelines through First Nations land to, you 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.

3:30I almost cried. It was such a compliment from him to even reach out. And we released this press release together, and to see that all blowing up now because of Trump. 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 Paris agreement, hitting their climate change targets, their emission targets.

4:09It's just, it's terrifying. The crazy thing for me is that we're just another species on this planet. If all this is crumbling around us, ultimately we will crumble too. And the fact that we can't wake up to that is 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. It's amazing how the ocean, when you get out of its way, how quickly it recovers. It is over 4 billion years of evolution to arrive at this perfect ecosystem of growing life.

4:50But the amount of pressure that we have put on the oceans in the last two, three hundred years, it's just the fact that it's even existing. I mean, Christina, my partner, was just in Ghana here 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 six degrees over a two-year period.

5:22Well, I photographed 80 sea 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. The ocean is one of these things that when it folds it's gonna fold quickly and it's gonna have immediate impacts on us. 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 you have wiped out tuna populations and this food that we've lived off of, but now there's so many people demanding food from the oceans.

6:02When 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, a fish that should not be in these waters, and you get Piscine Rio virus, which is 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. 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 sea ecosystem.

6:38They've all disappeared. We're seeing okostars, which are the beautiful starfish that are basically melting. You see them dying on the rocks because the water's 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 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, it's through fossil fuels, that's where we have to address it.

7:09There's not going to be any magic cure. people talk about putting a garden hose in the sky and creating a vapor barrier or a water, you know, a cloud barrier between the sun and earth. I mean, that's an asinine solution. We're talking about moving to Mars. You know, 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 icebreaker. 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 icebreaker that was smashing ice just to get through it.

7:48I could hardly sleep. You know you're at the water level it sounds like someone's beating on your room with a sledgehammer and this is ice that lives for many years. Ice that'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 we never saw ice. So little sailboats are going through. This year they brought a cruise ship through the Northwest Passage with 2 ,000 guests on it, you know, on a ship that can't touch ice or go near ice. It's that open now.

8:17And all of a sudden, rather than 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? We have 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.

8:54How 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 and 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 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 continued to wake up too late then ultimately it's gonna catch up to us and it is catching up to us.

9:40We'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 well here dies it becomes a toxic waste site it's so full of PCBs there's just so many pollutants 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 coffee shop.

10:17Stop using plastic bags. I was just in Rwanda and 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. If 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. You know, just figure out where you have the bandwidth to make change, whether it's in your cafeteria at work or your cafeteria at school for your kids. 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 whether you're going to have that third or fourth kid.

11:01If you're really on the fence about it, if you factor in the planet, you're not going to have that third or fourth kid. We'll be back with another positive story from a past interview next Thursday, and we'll pull it from our highest performing clips according to our digital community. Head over to youtube.com slash Graham Bensinger to join us. Thanks again for listening.