Page 81 - Sharp September 2024

and text by Mittermeier, Hope combines 200 of the photographer’s most powerful images with meditations on the oceans, the polar regions, Indigenous knowledge, and the afterlife. Publishing Hope, it turns out, was an act of defiance in itself. “Books don’t really exist in the way that they used to, and publishers are not very keen to produce photography books,” Mittermeier says. “But there’s still a hunger out there. People still love books.” Mittermeier proved this by crowdfunding the book’s production and more than doubling her initial goal of $100,000 USD in pre-orders with the help of thousands of backers around the world.
Both a career retrospective and a call to action, the book is dedicated to subjects that inspire hope in Mittermeier, including a section devoted to portraits of Indigenous Peoples from the Arctic to the Horn of Africa. “I’ve spent a lot of time with Indigenous people around the world, and they really have a very different mindset about what economic success is, and how we can live on this planet without becoming this greedy, consuming machine,” she says. “I derive a lot of hope from that because what makes a human complete in their worldview is finding joy in the simple things: family, community, ritual, sunrise, sunset. Those are beautiful things that don’t require us to destroy the planet.”
Hope’s first printing will be just over 6,500 copies, but Mittermeier’s growing international profile — along with her tendency to speak frankly about the fate of our planet — will amplify
its reach exponentially. “The biggest threat doesn’t come from coal power plants in China and India, it comes from Google and Meta,” she says. “They are the biggest influence on our planet, and their technology can doom us or can save us.”
As it happens, Mittermeier has been invited to address a curated group of corporate and world leaders at a Google campus in Italy, and she plans to share this insight with them. She also plans to present a similarly themed presentation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where she’s been invited to speak early next year. “I am going to tell them the truth about things that they don’t get to see because they never put on a mask and look in the ocean,” she says. “They need to hear that the damages are irreversible, that we will never recover the reefs, that we will never recover the whales, and that whatever decisions they make next, they’ll need to own the consequences of what they decide.”
Despite the destruction she has witnessed, Mittermeier is sanguine about what will happen if humanity doesn’t make the course corrections required to live sustainably on our planet. “I did a podcast recently and the host said, “Earth will Earth, regardless of what humans do to nature and biodiversity, Earth will continue.” And I would love to be a fly on the wall to see what happens next when there are no more humans,” she says. “We can’t kill the Earth. We will cause ourselves a lot of suffering, and we will cause the destruction of so much, but Earth will Earth. And there’s hope in that too.”
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