I’ve always thought of myself as an adventure seeker, but after hearing photographer Paul Nicklen speak at National Geographic last night, I’m beginning to realize that I haven’t aimed nearly high enough.
Nicklen spoke about growing up with the Inuit in the far reaches of the northern Canadian tundra and spending every moment he could outdoors. He grew up without telephone, radio, television, or computer games but learned to speak Inuktiut and saw his first polar bear when he was five years old. He had seagulls and and baby seals as pets and ate raw and dried raw meat as a high-protein snack.
Later, while studying to become a biologist in Vancouver, he began to miss the vast open spaces and the polar animals he had once known so intimately. Although wildlife biology is very important work, he was overwhelmed by the tedium of book learning and knew that he’d never truly be happy tracking animals for data purposes. So he imagined the perfect life for himself: a wildlife photographer with National Geographic. Two years after seriously taking up photography, he published his first book, and some years later he finally made it to National Geographic.
He gave us a slideshow of his awesome photographs and explained how he dives in freezing waters. Most of his photographs are taken in the the Arctic and Antarctic, and he has learned to read his body’s signals very carefully to know how much time he has before hypothermia and frostbite set in (about 20 minutes).
He also described his encounters with polar animals, like the 400 lb. elephant seal pup who jumped on him and began to suck on his cheek, and the leopard seal that kept trying to feed him penguins.
Nicklen’s singular focus for everything he does lies in his love for polar regions and his desire to protect the bio-diversity of the ecosystem. It turns out that climate scientists have been wrong for the past few years: polar regions are melting at a much faster rate than anyone predicted. Scientists now have unquestionable evidence that the ice caps are melting at an unprecedented rate, and they expect the ice in the Arctic to disappear in the next 7 to 20 years.
In so many ways, Nicklen made me feel like I needed to make up for lost time.
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