Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative: Cristina Mittermeier on Photography Book “Hope”
During her decades-long career as a conservation photographer, Cristina Mittermeier has visited some of the world’s most remote places and photographed its most elusive creatures. She has swum with sperm whales, documented communities around the globe, and captured images of underwater ecosystems seen by human eyes. She has also witnessed firsthand the impact humans have had on these places, from bleached coral reefs in the Pacific to the destructive effects of climate change on sea life in the Canadian Arctic. Despite being an eyewitness to the ongoing, and in many cases irreversible, damage humans are causing to the planet, Mittermeier has not lost hope. Instead, she’s redoubled her efforts to convince corporate and government leaders to take action before it’s too late. In her new book, Hope, Mittermeier captures the urgency of this message and the beauty of what we stand to lose.
“It’s a bit like building a levee to protect yourself against the flood of bad news and hopelessness in the world,” says Mittermeier, who recently returned from an expedition to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. “I’m hoping that people, as they go through the pages of this book, can encounter these little nuggets of hope and take them with them throughout their days.”
Born and raised in Mexico and now based on Vancouver Island, Mittermeier has earned global renown for creating breathtaking images that draw attention to environmental causes. In 2005, Mittermeier founded the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP), coining the term “conservation photography” in the process. In 2014, Mittermeier and her partner, fellow conservation photographer Paul Nicklen, founded SeaLegacy, a nonprofit dedicated to using visual storytelling to make a positive impact on the world’s oceans. More recently, Mittermeier and Nicklen have partnered with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, which supports their work as part of its ongoing mission to safeguard and preserve the planet for future generations.
“What makes a human complete in their worldview is finding joy in the simple things: family, community, ritual, sunrise, sunset. Those are beautiful things that don’t require us to destroy the planet.”
Cristina Mittermeier
With a foreword by actor and conservationist Robert Redford and text by Mittermeier, Hope combines 200 of the photographer’s most powerful images with meditations on the oceans, the polar regions, Indigenous knowledge, and the afterlife. Publishing Hope, it turns out, was an act of defiance in itself.
“Books don’t really exist in the way that they used to, and publishers are not very keen to produce photography books,” Mittermeier says. “But there’s still a hunger out there. People still love books.” Mittermeier proved this by crowdfunding the book’s production and more than doubling her initial goal of $100,000 USD in pre-orders with the help of thousands of backers around the world.
Both a career retrospective and a call to action, the book is dedicated to subjects that inspire hope in Mittermeier, including a section devoted to portraits of Indigenous Peoples from the Arctic to the Horn of Africa. “I’ve spent a lot of time with Indigenous people around the world, and they really have a very different mindset about what economic success is, and how we can live on this planet without becoming this greedy, consuming machine,” she says. “I derive a lot of hope from that because what makes a human complete in their worldview is finding joy in the simple things: family, community, ritual, sunrise, sunset. Those are beautiful things that don’t require us to destroy the planet.”
Hope’s first printing will be just over 6,500 copies, but Mittermeier’s growing international profile — along with her tendency to speak frankly about the fate of our planet — will amplify its reach exponentially. “The biggest threat doesn’t come from coal power plants in China and India, it comes from Google and Meta,” she says. “They are the biggest influence on our planet, and their technology can doom us or can save us.”
As it happens, Mittermeier has been invited to address a curated group of corporate and world leaders at a Google campus in Italy, and she plans to share this insight with them. She also plans to present a similarly themed presentation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where she’s been invited to speak early next year.
“I am going to tell them the truth about things that they don’t get to see because they never put on a mask and look in the ocean,” she says. “They need to hear that the damages are irreversible, that we will never recover the reefs, that we will never recover the whales, and that whatever decisions they make next, they’ll need to own the consequences of what they decide.”
Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative: Cristina Mittermeier on Photography Book “Hope”
Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative: Cristina Mittermeier on Photography Book “Hope”
Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative: Cristina Mittermeier on Photography Book “Hope”
Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative: Cristina Mittermeier on Photography Book “Hope”
Despite the destruction she has witnessed, Mittermeier is sanguine about what will happen if humanity doesn’t make the course corrections required to live sustainably on our planet. “I did a podcast recently and the host said, “Earth will Earth, regardless of what humans do to nature and biodiversity, Earth will continue.” And I would love to be a fly on the wall to see what happens next when there are no more humans,” she says. “We can’t kill the Earth. We will cause ourselves a lot of suffering, and we will cause the destruction of so much, but Earth will Earth. And there’s hope in that too.”
