
A call to action by Cristina Mittermeier, SeaLegacy
Meet Cristina Mittermeier, co-founder of SeaLegacy. Along with photographer Paul Nicklen, she utilises the power of visual storytelling to engage millions of people every day in a dialogue about the alarming threats and the solutions facing our planet’s largest ecosystem. What does Luxury mean? Luxury does not equal being wasteful, shallow and wanton. For me, luxury is finding a pristine forest or beach that doesn’t bear the scars of human carelessness. It is the opportunity for solitude in a very crowded planet, and the knowledge that my privilege to pamper myself does not mean someone else is suffering. What is the health report of our oceans in 2019? Things have gotten much worse on so many fronts. We are seeing more and more animals, especially large marine mammals, like whales, die because they have ingested plastic; there is an all-out assault by the Trump administration on existing protections against oil drilling and industrial fishing; nations like Japan and Iceland have gone rogue and decided that they don’t have to comply with the rest of the planet and that commercial whaling is morally acceptable; most dramatic is that the temperature of the ocean in many places is causing the rapid death of entire coral ecosystems, kelp forests and perhaps most terrifying,...