Mittermeier photographed this whale shark near Isla Mujeres in the Mexican Caribbean and shared the image with 1.2 million followers on Instagram. "These gentle creatures play an important role in bringing both beauty and health to an ecosystem," she wrote.
Unblinking
Conservation photographer Cristina Mittermeier has a clear-eyed view of our environmental crisis and a hard-edged strategy for addressing it
It was the most shared climate story of 2017.
A starving polar bear rummaged for food in a rusty barrel on Somerset Island in the Canadian Arctic. His ragged fur hung over a painfully angular frame. With sea ice melting in warming oceans, polar bears can’t reach the seals that are their main food source. They spend half their time hunting for food and even in the best of times only catch one or two of every ten seals they stalk. Desperate and hungry, the bears seek calories anywhere they might be able to find them.
The video and images sparked outrage around the world, just as photographers Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen intended. They believe weaponizing social media to convert apathy into action is exactly what’s needed to wake people up.
“We use photography because it lowers the price of entry into a conversation that matters to all of us,” says Mittermeier, who grew up in Cuernavaca, Mexico and has devoted
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