Editor’s Note: (Call to Earth is a CNN editorial series dedicated to reporting on our planet’s environmental challenges and their solutions. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet initiative has partnered with CNN to raise awareness and educate about important Promote sustainability issues and encourage positive action.)
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(CNN) Water cascading off a wall of ice, with gray brushstrokes of clouds overhead, makes for a beautiful image — but the story behind it is one of destruction; Earth’s glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate due to human-caused climate change.
Canadian photographer Paul Nicklen remembers taking the photo. It was August 2014 and temperatures in Svalbard, Norway, were unusually warm – exceeding 21 degrees Celsius. As he rounded the corner of an ice cap on the island of Nordaustlandet, he saw more than a dozen waterfalls pouring off its side.
“It was the most poetic and beautiful scene I’ve ever seen, but it was also haunting and frightening,” he recalls. The image symbolized the reality of climate change and became Nicklen’s best-selling art image. It has appeared multiple times in National Geographic, was used by Al Gore in his climate talks, and graced the cover of Pearl Jam’s 2020 album Gigaton, whose title refers to the unit used to calculate ice mass.
Its beauty is central to its impact, Nicklen believes. “When you take a sharp, properly exposed, moody and powerful photo, it creates an instinctive response,” he says. “It has to be beautiful and appealing, it has to invite you… and it has to have a conservation message.”
In 2014 Nicklen co-founded the non-profit organization SeaLegacy with his wife Cristina Mittermeier and later with Andy Mann (both also award-winning photographers), which uses film and photography to raise awareness of climate issues and help protect the planet.
“Photography is one of the most effective and powerful tools we have for telling complex stories, like the story of climate change,” says Mittermeier.
An emaciated polar bear staggers in search of food. The photo, taken in 2017, attracted widespread attention and sparked discussion about climate change.
She witnessed this power with one of her own photos taken in August 2017 showing a starving polar bear. After being published in National Geographic, the photo and accompanying video went viral and was shared on social media and by news organizations worldwide. It sparked a global discussion on climate change, provoking reactions ranging from concern and empathy to climate change denial. But there was no denying that it shook the world: “People still remember it and react violently when they see it,” Mittermeier looks back.
As guest editors of the CNN series Call to Earth, Nicklen and Mittermeier chose these two images along with eight others that they believe warned the world about the climate crisis.
war photographers
A kangaroo leaps past a burning house at Lake Conjola, Australia, in December 2019. This season’s bushfires were among the worst the country had ever seen, with nearly three billion animals killed or displaced.
Nicklen compares photographing climate change to photographing conflict. “We are out there on the front lines of the war being waged against our planet. It’s emotionally draining and draining,” he says.
In recent decades, as climate disasters have become more frequent and intense, images have captured the urgency of the situation more clearly. Six dead giraffes, emaciated bodies from lack of food and water, photographed by Ed Ram show the horror of Kenya’s ongoing drought, which has threatened and displaced animals and humans alike. Photos of wildfires as they ravaged Australia in 2019 and 2020 show the extent of the devastation, with homes burning and wildlife fleeing desperately.
The bodies of six giraffes lie on the outskirts of the village of Eyrib in the Sabuli Wildlife Conservancy, Kenya in 2021. A prolonged drought in the north-east of the country and the wider Horn of Africa has resulted in food and water shortages for both animals and local communities.
“They show that climate change doesn’t happen somewhere else, it happens everywhere,” says Mittermeier. “Suddenly there’s a knock much closer to your own door.”
Mittermeier remembers the work of her friend and great role model Gary Braasch, whom she describes as a “climate change chronicler”. The photographer, who died in 2016, dedicated the last two decades of his life to documenting how the Earth was changing in response to global warming — from Antarctica, with its melting glaciers, to Bangladesh’s Bhola Island, where sea levels are rising and erosion has affected villages made islands. Braasch’s commitment to the cause was seminal for Nicklens and Mittermeier’s generation of conservation photographers.
Villagers stand on a remnant of a road on Bhola Island, Bangladesh, in 2005. The area at the mouth of the Ganges Delta still suffers from accelerated erosion due to sea level rise. Check out this interactive content on CNN.com
The Slow Retreat
These photos, taken in 2007 and 2022, show the retreating Sólheimajökull glacier in Iceland. It is estimated that the rate of glacier melt has doubled over the past two decades due to global warming.
Sometimes, however, documenting climate change can be tedious. Sea levels are rising by a few millimeters every year – a barely visible increase, although it is happening faster than ever. But such changes add up, and when visually documented over years or decades, the effects become clear.
“It’s like photographing a slow-moving tsunami,” says Mittermeier. “Right now it’s often hard to see, but when two images are placed side by side it’s hard not to overlook the impact of the climate crisis.”
Read: Scientists listen to glaciers to uncover mysteries of the oceans
Photographer James Balog’s work was critical to the visual narrative of climate change, she says. Using a network of time-lapse cameras recording glaciers around the world, his Extreme Ice Survey has shown how glaciers disappear over time. The extensive archive of photos of each glacier, taken at any time of the day throughout the year, has also provided a baseline from which to measure future changes.
“It just became irrefutable evidence,” says Mittermeier. “It was a very important moment for climate photography.”
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coexistence
Polar bears move to an abandoned weather station in Kolyukhin, Russia. The majestic mammals are particularly vulnerable to climate change, which is melting the Arctic sea ice on which they depend.
Mittermeier and Nicklen have also selected images in which man and nature collide. One consequence of climate change is a dramatic loss of biodiversity. Since 1970, wildlife populations have declined by 69%, largely due to land-use changes that have fragmented key habitats and also rising temperatures that have led to mass extinctions, according to WWF’s 2022 Living Planet Report.
Read: The Icy Patience of an Arctic Photographer
As the Arctic warms nearly four times faster than the rest of the world, the ice polar bears depend on is melting. One of the winners of the 2022 Nature Photographer of the Year award, Dmitry Kokh’s House of Bears photo shows polar bears roaming an abandoned Soviet settlement on Kolyuchin Island. While the buildings have long been abandoned, Mittermeier believes this points to the increasing problem of polar bears — with no more ice to hunt for — encroaching on human areas and hitting local people, with tragic consequences for both sides.
Alice, Stanley and their child were displaced when floods destroyed their home in Kenya in 2017. They are photographed together in the same image as Najin, one of the world’s last two northern white rhinos, at Ol Pejeta Conservancy. It is part of photographer Nick Brandt’s The Day May Break series, which portrays people and animals affected by environmental degradation.
The impacts of climate change will – and are already happening – affect animals and humans alike. “It cannot be denied that we are all pulling together,” says Mittermeier. “We are all being devastated and unable to part with the life we share this planet with.”
Photographer Nick Brandt’s The Day May Break series depicts this by showing people and animals affected by environmental degradation. The photos, taken in animal shelters around the world, show people displaced by climate change events such as drought or floods, and animals who have been victims of habitat destruction or wildlife trade. Presenting both in one frame shows how deeply our destinies are interwoven.
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Hope
A school of colorful cardinalfish dodges a sea lion in the Galápagos Islands. The archipelago off the coast of Ecuador is famous for its vibrant marine life and one of the largest marine reserves in the world.
Among the images of devastation and expulsion there are also images that signify hope. In Brandt’s work, he points out that the subjects of the images, both human and animal, are survivors – “And therein lies hope and possibility,” he wrote in an email.
Read: The ocean’s ‘blue carbon’ may be our secret weapon in the fight against climate change
For Mittermeier and Nicklen, and SeaLegacy as a whole, spreading a message of hope is critical to the broader mission. “Martin Luther King didn’t start his famous speech by reminding us that we are living in a nightmare – he told us what the dream is,” says Mittermeier. “You have to point out what we’re aiming for and show where the hope lies.”
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She believes that hope lies in wildlife and the ocean. People are only just realizing the role both play in mitigating climate change, and restoring nature will be crucial to averting the crisis. For Mittermeier, her photo of a sea lion rising to the surface in the Galapagos — one of the world’s largest marine sanctuaries — shows how marine life can thrive with the right protection. And Nicklen’s photo of a bowhead whale represents one of our greatest allies in decarbonization: Not only are whales’ bodies enormous stores of carbon, their feces fuel phytoplankton, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Bowhead whales, like this one photographed near Baffin Island, Canada, can live for over 200 years. Some may have witnessed firsthand the effects of climate change since the industrial revolution.
By showing the beauty of the planet, the two believe they can show people it’s still worth fighting for.
“We try to climb the highest mountain and scream from the mountain tops that this planet is dying and we are in danger,” says Nicklen.
“But the only emotion that is greater than fear is hope,” adds Mittermeier. “And you can only feel hope if you take action.”