Spotlight: Cristina
Cristina Mittermeier interviewed by JJ Ramberg.
Cristina Mittermeier is one of those people you wish you could have by your side at all times. She inspires you to do better, to be better as she cares about our planet and the people and creatures living on it in a way we all should. She’s had the kind of career that most people dream of — world-renowned National Geographic photographer with a degree in Biochemical Engineering in Marine Sciences, co-founder of SeaLegacy.org, UN SDG14 Ambassador, and now NewAtlantis Founding Advisor. Here is our conversation, but you can learn more about Cristina here.
You are so many things — photographer, biologist, conservationist to name a few. How do you describe yourself?
I’m an urgent messenger for what’s happening to our planet. I’m Paul Revere. I imagine the earth as a plane and I am a passenger in row 18F looking out the window and watching pieces of the airplane flying off. I’m trying to raise the alarm and the person sitting next to me is saying, “Why do you care?” I care because we’re all going to crash.
For the longest time, I felt like I was really alone and people would just yawn at me when I sounded that alarm. But recently I think we have turned the corner. For the longest time, we thought that the government was going to fix the problems or that the market was going to fix them. And now we’re realizing that it’s going to take all of us doing our best thinking and our best collaborating to actually fix what is destroying our planet.
You have been an advocate of conservation and ocean regeneration for decades and have been witness to great wins and great disappointments. Are you optimistic right now?
I am, I am optimistic because I see that people are starting to wake up to the fact that right now is not just a great opportunity for everybody to protect the ocean. It’s the next chapter in the history of humanity. And who doesn’t want to be part of that?
I think we still have time to fix things. I have loved every minute that I’ve spent on this planet and the things that I’ve gotten to see. And I would love for the next generation to be able to see the same things. I don’t want to live on a planet that has lost all its magic and all its beauty. And I don’t think we have to. We can still make it better.
Becoming a marine biologist and working in conservation, being on the frontlines, and realizing how close we’re coming to the 11th hour, has made me see that saving the planet is an urgent need. But I am optimistic that we can change things.
I’ve always felt the smallness of being a human on this planet. When you are looking at the galaxies at night, you understand how alone we are. All we have is what’s on this planet... And so we need to protect it. That’s it. For me, it’s always been so clear, right? There’s nowhere else to go.
Why have you directed your passion and efforts toward the ocean?
I was a little girl when they did that first photograph of the Earth from space. And if you look at that picture, you can see clearly that we are on an ocean planet. So if the ocean is our largest ecosystem, we should be focusing on that ecosystem to address the issue. I mean, if we were a spaceship, and you open the hood, it would all be saltwater. It’s our engine.
In school, I studied fisheries biology and aquaculture just trying to answer the question, how do we feed humanity without harming our planet? And we talked about how the ocean is not just water. When you go to the beach and you get tumbled by a wave and you take a big gulp, you’re actually swallowing billions of creatures. Those creatures are the engine of the planet. They are the magic that allows the chemistry between the ocean and the atmosphere to happen. And that is where life came from. That’s where the first exhalation of oxygen happened. Carbon dioxide was magically photosynthesized and turned into something that other creatures could use to breathe.
With all of your experience, why have you landed on a focus on biodiversity in the ocean as a solution to saving the planet?
The more you dive into what the problem is, you realize that the building blocks of life on Earth on this planet are our fellow passengers on spaceship Earth — biodiversity. We don’t even know how many are there. And we don’t even know what role they play. But we, as humans have taken a hammer to them and we are causing the sixth extinction. We are probably going to lose half of the biodiversity of this planet unless we do something dramatically different.
Biodiversity is important because it’s never one species. It’s the interconnected web of ecosystem relationships that makes life possible. And when we lose one, because we know nothing about our planet, we don’t know the cascade of consequences that are that will come about. Losing a single species, losing that little block, may collapse the whole Jenga tower. I think for humanity to stay on Earth, we just have to recognize that biodiversity is our key ally.
When you are in the ocean — just you, your camera, and all of the creatures and plants that live below, what do you feel?
I really like the humbling feeling of being a part of the food chain. And every time you enter the ocean, you are signing a tacit agreement that now you are part of the food chain. If it’s your day, it’s your day, right? It forces you to get rid of that human arrogance of saying “I’m superior and I can get away with things.”
We know you are in hot demand and are asked to work on a lot of projects. How was NA lucky enough to get your attention?
I met Courtney and quickly knew that she is one of those people who is always thinking about how they can do more. So when she created NewAtlantis with Gordon and with a community of people who were bringing their skills together to solve a problem, I was compelled to be a part of it. I am so amazed because we have been trying to solve the same problems by using the same set of tools for the last 50 years and it doesn’t work. Hearing what the group at NA is thinking and their innovation and their ideas — I’m like, holy shit. We just need to flip the problem on its head and let other people help create the solutions. People are tired of being asked to do the least they can do. People want to give the full expression of their passion for the things they care about.
While we didn’t have time to talk about it, I am also particularly taken by Cristina’s philosophy of Enoughness. As she writes, “Enoughness is a word I came across on my travels when I met people that despite lacking material wealth, were immensely happy and felt like they have “enough”. It has to do with taking only what you need and using everything that you take, knowing that doing so will allow others to also have enough.” I encourage you all to read about it here.
