You want solely to observe a single Sir David Attenborough wildlife documentary to know that nature isn’t honest.
But when famend wildlife photographers, Cristina Goettsch Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen, documented a severely malnourished polar bear throughout a SeaLegacy exhibition roughly 9 years in the past, it hit house laborious – very laborious.
The uncomfortable photographs and pictures captured in August 2017 weren’t simply one other merciless instance of the circle of life, however a picture of one among Earth’s most opulent creatures, diminished to a skeletal shadow of its former self. And relying on whom you requested, it was all our fault.
Cristina herself did clarify in an Instagram post (above) that the cause of the bear’s state was impossible to tell. However, comparisons with climate change were inevitable.
Polar bears have long been used to raise awareness of melting glaciers, due to the impact to their habitat. And indeed, the image has been shared, once again, by @pawnewsnetwork with the headline: “The heartbreaking polar bear photo that changed how millions see climate change.”
In a world the place questions are being raised concerning the affect of AI on the surroundings, photographs resembling this are massively vital in elevating consciousness concerning the potential wider affect on our planet’s species.
When images can generally appear much less related than it ever has performed, situations like this are a stark reminder of the endurance of nice imagery.
Even on this age of video, I nonetheless consider {that a} single body carries extra weight. There’s no lead as much as the decisive second, no lingering afterwards, it’s merely there, for the viewer to see whether or not they prefer it or not.
What Cristina and Paul captured that day is a number of the most visceral, evocative and heartwrenching wildlife imaging I’ve ever seen. As quickly as I used to be assigned this text, I might see a picture of the polar bear in my thoughts’s eye earlier than I even clicked on the hyperlink.