Starving-Polar-Bear Photographer Recalls What Went Wrong

One year after Cristina Mittermeier took that gut-wrenching polar bear image later, she explains what she and her team were trying to accomplish. This story appeared in the August 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Climate change kills slowly and by proxy: through fire, drought, cold, and starvation. The connection between an individual animal’s death and climate change is rarely clear—even when an animal is as emaciated as this polar bear.

Photographer Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier were on a mission to capture images that communicate the urgency of climate change. She admits they were naive. The polar bear picture went viral—and people took it literally.

When Paul posted the video on Instagram, he wrote, “This is what starvation looks like.”  But he did not say that this particular bear was killed by climate change.

National Geographic picked up the video and added subtitles. It became the most viewed video on National Geographic’s website—ever. News organizations around the world ran stories about it; social media exploded with opinions about it. Cristina estimated that an astonishing 2.5 billion people were reached. But they lost control of the narrative.

The first line of the National Geographic video said, “This is what climate change looks like”—with “climate change” highlighted in the brand’s distinctive yellow. In retrospect, National Geographic went too far with the caption.

Perhaps we made a mistake in not telling the full story—that we were looking for a picture that foretold the future and that we didn’t know what had happened to this particular polar bear. I can’t say that this bear was starving because of climate change.

Cristina Mittermeier is a contributing photographer, speaker, and explorer for National Geographic. She is the co-founder, executive director, and vision lead of SeaLegacy, a nonprofit organization working to protect the oceans. 

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/08/explore-through-the-lens-starving-polar-bear-photo/