The Next Eco-Warriors (15 page)

PHOTO BY MATTHEW NEWTON

_________

Allana Beltran continues to campaign and use her artistic talent as a tool to protect Tasmania's old-growth forests, creatively bridging the gaps between the human world and the natural world. Tasmania's forests are still wild and still threatened, however, due to the growing strength of the international campaign, the demand for Tasmanian old-growth woodchips has dramatically declined. Change does look close for these forests
.

Thirty
Canada
Filmmaker

PHOTO BY VERUSCHKA MATCHETT

I TAKE A LAST DEEP BREATH BEFORE diving underwater. As I kick deeper, bands of sunlight dance across the reef on Grand Cayman Island. I'm trying to stay calm and move gracefully so I can stay down longer and not frighten the teeming life around me.

The yellowtail jacks grow accustomed to my presence and swim closer. I try to reach out and touch them. The school—an undulating wall of fish— parts perfectly around my arm. I'm only eight years old; it is another five years until I'm old enough to start scuba diving lessons. For now though, the way I've learned to explore the ocean is through free diving and holding my breath for as long as I can.

The longer I stay underwater, the less the fish are afraid of me. They're very sensitive, moving every time my heart beats. Underwater, for a couple minutes at a time, I get to fly in this magical and colorful world, meeting and interacting with creatures beyond my wildest imagination. As much as I love the colorful fish and coral formations, I'm really in search of one animal in particular—a shark.

Peering out from behind a rock, I finally see the telltale shape of a Caribbean reef shark just slightly bigger than me. I watch as it moves closer, swimming gracefully and without effort.

I try to stay calm but am overwhelmed with excitement. The animal I wanted to meet most was finally in front of me, the closest thing to a dragon or dinosaur possible, but even cooler because it was real and existed.

After just a few seconds, I make a break for the surface for air. The shark notices me, and instead of moving in for the attack, it flees. How impossible, I thought, the shark is scared of
me
.

Watching one of the oldest and most feared predators in the world retreat in fear changed something in me forever. I realized that if the shark, this fearsome beast, was afraid of me, a little boy, then I knew that despite all the fear-mongering stories in the world, I had nothing to be afraid of. From that point on, I spent as much time underwater as possible, not only to take advantage of my newfound freedom, but also to try to hang out with these fascinating predators.

Twelve years later, I had a biology degree and was chief photographer for
Canadian Wildlife
magazine. I soon found myself on an eighteen-hour boat ride to Darwin and Wolf Islands, one of the most important gathering places for sharks, some 160 miles (257.5 kilometers) north of the Galapagos Archipelago, 900 miles (1,448.4 kilometers) from Ecuador. I was on assignment to photograph hammerhead sharks, my favorite sharks, for the first time in my life. Here, hammerhead sharks congregate in greater concentrations than anywhere else in the world, to socialize and find mates.

I woke up at four in the morning to see if we were any closer to these mystical islands. As I looked out over the waves, I started to see little black flags sticking out of the water. Not knowing what they were, I imagined they were secret dive sites or flags to mark particularly shark-rich areas. But I would soon find out that these little, tattered flags were actually attached
to longlines, which were catching and killing the very animals I had come to film.

Longlining is a brutal and indiscriminate fishing method explicitly banned in the Galapagos. A single longline can have up to sixteen thousand hooks on a sixty-two-mile (99.8-kilometer) line, almost long enough to stretch from Earth to outer space. Despite targeting specific species, they kill indiscriminately, taking seals, dolphins, sea turtles, and sea birds, contributing to humans wasting fifty-four billion pounds (24.5 billion kilograms) of fish each year as bycatch—animals that are killed and thrown back because they aren't the target species.

We spent the entire day pulling in thirty-seven miles (59.5 kilometers) of longlines, releasing the couple dozen sharks that were still alive, and throwing hundreds of dead sharks back into the sea. We were in a UNESCO World Heritage Site protected by the Ecuadorian military, supposedly one of the most protected marine reserves on the planet. If sharks are being fished here so blatantly, I feared they must be in even worse trouble in the rest of the ocean, which is mostly unprotected.

I soon found out that more than one hundred million sharks were being killed each year, and that shark populations were plummeting worldwide. What's worse, to my horror, no one cared—largely, I believed, because everyone was afraid of them.

As a photographer, I turned my efforts toward educating the public about the plight of sharks through magazine and newspaper articles. I also set up a fund so readers could donate money toward putting a patrol boat at Darwin and Wolf Islands in the Galapagos.

This became my mission not just because I loved sharks but also because I loved the ocean. Sharks have been here for more than 450 million years—150 million years before the dinosaurs. They're the world's ultimate survivors. Having lived through five mass extinctions, they evolved into one of the most highly adapted and successful animals on Earth. They're the world's foremost predator, responsible for shaping today's oceans and much of the life in it.

Sharks sit on top of oceanic ecosystems, the very ecosystems that consume carbon dioxide and provide the oxygen in the air we breathe. If we look
to basic biology, we know that if sharks are eliminated, the species below them in the food chain will dramatically increase in population, setting off a chain reaction that would reshape the marine ecosystem. At the bottom of this chain, we find tiny plants that convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, producing more than half the oxygen in our atmosphere. Removing the top predator from the most important ecosystem on this planet could have huge consequences for our own survival.

But why were people killing them?

The simple answer is money. There is an enormous and growing demand for shark fin soup. Through much of Asia, but most popularly China, shark fin soup is a status symbol and is served as a sign of respect. Now a ubiquitous dish at banquets and weddings, a single pound (.5 kilogram) of shark fin sells for more than three hundred dollars. Once reserved for emperors, the booming middle class in China has created such a massive demand that a single whale shark fin can fetch more than fifty thousand dollars. Shark bodies are less valuable and spoil quickly, so fishermen started finning to increase profits. They cut the fins off and throw the rest, 95 percent of it, overboard. By drying the fins, fishermen can avoid expensive refrigeration systems, and even the most decrepit boats can fin sharks and turn a huge profit. Though this practice has been outlawed in many countries, it continues unmonitored and unabated in international waters, spurred on by what is estimated to be a multibillion-dollar market worldwide.

The huge demand for fins and poor fishing regulations have decimated shark populations in every ocean on Earth. Studies from Dalhousie University show that shark and large predator populations in the oceans have dropped an estimated 90 percent in the last fifty years. The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service says some species of shark, such as tiger, bull, mako,
and great white, have dropped by more than 95 percent and are on the verge of extinction.

Realizing the gravity of the situation and my lack of success using print media, I knew I needed a more powerful weapon. I needed to not just educate the public about the plight of sharks but also reverse the media's portrayal of sharks as menacing predators to people—something Hollywood had perfected. As long as people believed all sharks were like the ones portrayed in
Jaws
, nobody would want to protect them.

Once I was back in my home city of Toronto, my dad told me about a new kind of video camera that George Lucas was using to shoot
Star Wars
. High-definition cameras were brand new and were high-enough resolution for their images to be printed in magazines. With this new technology, I started plotting out a film that would visually capture the public's attention while changing its views of sharks.

I immediately started looking around for equipment and financing and, most important, people who were willing to undertake this journey with me. There were, however, few organizations working to protect sharks. I heard about the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and the work they were doing with whale conservation. I got in contact with their leader, Captain Paul Watson, to look into a campaign to save sharks. Watson has been battling illegal whaling for years. He's been shot at and rammed and sunk a whole Norwegian whaling fleet in the process. Watson invited me to join a campaign on their 165-foot (50.3-meter) ship, the
Ocean Warrior
, to confront shark poaching in the oceans of South and Central America.

Getting into gear as fast as I could, I assembled a makeshift crew out of a couple of longtime friends and borrowed enough money to rent HD cameras. We quickly jumped on a plane and met Watson and the crew of the
Ocean Warrior
in Los Angeles.