Photographer Brian Skerry is underwater — a lot. For 47 years, he has explored Earth's oceans. And life below the surface is looking worse than ever.
His latest documentary, “Sea Change,” produced with GBH, takes a deep dive — quite literally — into the Gulf of Maine and the effects of climate change on New England's lobster and clam industries. It premieres July 24 in tandem with Skerry's cover story for National Geographic.
"Every other breath that a human being takes comes from the sea," Skerry told CAI. "And yet we have dumped so much carbon into the atmosphere that the ocean is becoming saturated and we are changing its chemistry."
Patrick Flanary I've never spoken to an underwater photographer. What's the day-to-day like?
Brian Skerry For the last 26 years for National Geographic, I've traveled eight or nine months a year and done over 30 feature stories. I had conversations with GBH about doing the series, which ultimately got greenlit, and then I served as one of three producers and worked in the underwater space.
PF A large part of this series is not what you saw, but what you didn't see underwater.
BS That's right. I grew up in Massachusetts and lived most of my life there. I moved to the coast of Maine about seven years ago. But I started diving in 1977 or 1978, and my first dives were in the Gulf of Maine.
It's this body of water that extends in the south from Cape Cod up through the Maritimes. And it was created after the last Ice Age and is quite unique in the world. It just has this amazing proliferation of life that in no small way built America. The Portuguese and the Basques came over here in the 14th and 15th centuries for cod and the bounty of the Gulf of Maine. And even when I started diving, I would go off the beaches of Chatham and see schools of fish — herring and pollock and just so much richness. I just assumed that's the way it was always going to be. But I don't see those things these days.
As I began this project, I went back to my old haunts. I went to the places where I used to see lots of invertebrates and all these wonderful exotic creatures. However, it was really hard to find them. Right now it's really being affected by climate change. The Gulf of Maine has been identified by science to be warming faster than 97% of the rest of the global ocean. It is one of the epicenters of climate change, and we're seeing the effects of that.
PF Are you ever at the dinner table with folks who are friends or family who deny climate change? And, if so, how do you handle those conversations?
BS It's a great question, and yes, I am. I do encounter that from time to time, and my position has always been to not be preachy. I try to offer personal observations, and I also present the scientific evidence. We can look at the data: Since the Industrial Revolution, you can parallel the rise in in temperature. You see that as we burn fossil fuels, it results in the greenhouse effect and temperatures get warmer. And with warming temperatures and more carbon in the air, we see the melting glaciers and polar regions. We see it affecting our planet in many different ways and especially in the ocean. The ocean is the greatest carbon sink on Earth. It takes in more carbon and gives us back more oxygen. And it is becoming more acidic.
This project for GBH was really unique. It was a beautifully rich story that in many ways was a blue-chip natural history documentary where we were taking people in and showing them behavior of lobsters and alewife and seals and all these other great things. But we also get into the richness of the coastal communities. We show fishermen and we show the economies of these regions of the Gulf of Maine. We show how traditional fishermen may be pivoting because of climate change impacts to other things like aquaculture. I think what viewers and audiences will see is this richness that gives a really nice picture of what this region, the Gulf of Maine, is all about.
PF Who put the first camera in your hands?
BS I did. I started out just wanting to be a diver. When I was about 15 years old, I started scuba diving and that was really my goal. Growing up as a little boy, my parents would take me to the beaches of Cape Cod and Rhode Island. And I dreamed about being an ocean explorer.
But maybe a year or two after that, I attended a dive show in the Boston Sea, and as a teenager I remember sitting in that darkened audience and watching underwater photographers and documentary filmmakers present their work about the ocean. And I often describe it as an epiphany. I remember riding home on the MBTA that night to my car with my girlfriend, where I drove back to my little hometown of Uxbridge at the time. And I said to her, "I know what I want to do with my life. I want to be an underwater photographer." I had high aspirations. But dreams do come true.
