Brian Skerry landed at the Aspen airport and took note of the blue skies and snow, calling it “a little slice of heaven.”
Skerry has been to Aspen before, about a decade ago, to speak at the Aspen Institute. But the reason for his visit this time is to speak at another local institution: the Wheeler Opera House.
The Wheeler Opera House hosts a three-part series every year in partnership with the Changemaker Speaker Series, a nationwide program showcasing renowned explorers, journalists, photographers, astronauts and innovators.
His presentation, called Ocean Soul, is a culmination of his four decades and 12,000 hours in the ocean (this is equal to a year and four and a half months underwater). His intention is to take the audience with him through his photos for National Geographic over the last 27 years, more than 30 feature stories and seven cover stories, as well as videos showcasing how he got his shots.
Skerry views his work as an evolution of sorts. At the beginning of his career, he wanted to just capture photos of his favorite animals and places he was interested in traveling. As he spent more time underwater, his laissez-faire attitude did not last long.
“The more I explored, the more I saw a lot of problems occurring in earth’s oceans, things that I think most people might not be aware of unless you’re diving beneath those waves on a regular basis,” he said. “You might not know that the ocean’s are in trouble in many places.”
His work shifted, or ebbed and flowed as he joked, celebrating the beauty of the ocean and its animals from sharks to whales to seals to coral reefs to kelp forests, while also highlighting problems.
For example, humans have fished over 90% of big fish out of the ocean in the last 50 years, because of commercial fishing, Skerry said.
He has seen this play out over the entirety of his career.
“As a journalist, these weren’t the kinds of stories that I wanted to do,” Skerry said. “I’d much rather do happy stories or animal stories, but I felt a sense of responsibility and urgency to tell those stories, as well. But I also, with every story that I do about those kinds of things, I try to offer solutions.”
Skerry said that he thinks the greatest solution for protecting the earth’s oceans is to create protected spaces in them.
“Science tells us that we should protect 30-40% of earth’s oceans, but, depending on how you look at it, only 3-4% is currently protected,” he said.
In 2016, Skerry was with former President Barack Obama, when he created the world’s largest marine protected area in the northwest Hawaiian islands, Skerry was there to photograph the announcement, but Obama asked him to go snorkeling with him.
While in the water, Skerry photographed the only photographs of a U.S. president underwater.
Skerry always makes sure that ends his speaking engagements with a message of hope, because while he may be less optimistic than he used to be, we have a choice to make: “roll up into the fetal position or fight.”
“I have been diving for 47 years, and these are the things that I have seen in the ocean,” he said. “We’re a storytelling culture. So if you have that personal anecdote, that’s one thing, and then if you have the photographic evidence, if I can show pictures and say this is what’s happening and then have the science and data to back up the visuals, those are almost irrefutable.”
“So, I think the more we can do these things well, we can get people to understand what’s happening, why it matters, how it affects them or their children and what the solutions are,” he added.
