Nat Geo’s Brian Skerry Commitment to Save the Seas

For the past 19 years, National Geographic photographer Brian Skerry has been circumnavigating the globe taking breathtaking photos of the sea and its creatures. In his travels he has also documented human beings’ destruction of these massive bodies of water so critical to all life. “When you consider how important the ocean is to all of us — that 98 percent of the biosphere, 98 percent of where life can exist on planet Earth is ocean, and that we get most of our oxygen from there — it’s very sad to think that only about 3 percent of the ocean is actually protected,” said Skerry in a recent phone interview with The Independent. He also spoke about conservation efforts, educating people on the perils facing our oceans, and the traction being made by the global community to repair the ecosystems.

I’m excited about your upcoming lecture at UCSB. What exactly are you going to focus on? It is a broad topic, but I guess this particular lecture is really an update of my most recent group of my stories for National Geographic magazine. The lecture sort of unfolds with a bit of a retrospective in the sense that I’ll be talking to the audience about how I approach my work, what things I’ve learned over the years. I’ve been working for the magazine as a photographer for almost 19 years, and I just wrapped up my 27th feature story for them, so there’s been somewhat of an evolution in my career.

I began, like many photographers, just wanting to do stories about things that interested me — you know, cool animals and interesting places. But I began to see a lot of problems occurring in the world’s oceans, and didn’t see a lot of that getting covered, so as a journalist I sort of felt responsible to tell those stories as well, even though they’re not the more fun things to work on, but I wanted to talk about things like the global fish crisis problem, or the species that are in peril because of human anthropogenic stresses.