Judy Lehmberg

Can one photograph tell a story and inspire the world? One of Canada’s most celebrated visual storytellers has spent his career proving why the answer is yes. John Marriott – multi-book author, host of the web-based series Exposed and award-winning photographer – knows what it takes to capture a visual story and create a global market for it. John spoke with us by email to share his thoughts on responsible storytelling and what it takes for one image to demand the attention of the world.

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What sparked your love for nature – and your desire to help protect nature?

I’ve always loved nature and I’ve always loved science. I guess it began with exploring outside. My first memory was trying to catch crayfish and horned lizards. If someone told me to find a horned lizard, I could find one in five minutes. Now they’re on the endangered species list. We’ve covered their habitat with houses and we’ve introduced fire ants. Fire ants were accidentally brought into Mobile Bay, Alabama, and they have spread literally like wild fire. They’ve done a lot of damage to a lot of species, including horned lizards. If you look at the rate that we are losing them it’s really scary. And they’ve gone from being so common to so uncommon in my lifetime. That motivated me.

When you studied wildlife biology at Texas A&M, you were shattering glass ceilings for women at the school and in the profession.

I was the only female in most of my classes and I didn’t really know ahead of time it was going to be as hard as it was. One of my professors said, “honey, why aren’t you home barefoot and pregnant?” I was 18-years-old. It was hard, but I tried to not let it bother me and, after time, it didn’t. It just didn’t. I do wish now I had a good comeback to that professor though.

And because you refused to quit, you became a renowned educator on multiple continents helping multiple age groups understand why nature matters. Do you think, as a society, enough people understand the science of nature?

Too few people pay attention to nature and I think it’s because very few people understand how our world functions. I think every high school student on this earth should take at least a semester of environmental science because they need to know how the earth works. More people have to know the interconnectivity of life on this planet and why, when those connections are broken, it creates such big problems like we’re seeing now in terms of biodiversity and on many other fronts. Right now, those who understand the problems, they’re not making their voices loud enough and they don’t have the power.

If more people study science, do you think fewer people will doubt science?

You know, I really wish I knew the answer to that question: I don’t. It makes absolutely no sense to me that when somebody presents actual facts, peer reviews, studies, people then question its validity. My mother was a journalist and she believes one reason that people doubt environmental science is because journalists feel that they have to always present both sides. When it comes to science, you only need to present two sides if there is contrary science. But when it’s a scientist versus somebody with a vested interest, you’re manufacturing a second side that is based on opinion and not science. But if the public doesn’t know that – and they don’t understand the scientific peer review process – they begin to think there are two sides to the science, when there isn’t. You can’t have fact versus opinion. It needs to be fact versus fact and opinion versus opinion.

In fairness, most governments, most advocates and most companies say they make decisions using the best available science. And if too few of us understand nature and science, it’s really hard to know who truly is using the best available science.

If you look at scientific journals now, studies have to report who has funded their research and the peer review process should highlight possible bias and any kind of special interests at play. I think, in general, it’s getting easier for the public to determine best available science if they want to do their own investigations and find out who’s open to the answer the science provides and who is working to get the answer they want.

There are very few people willing to do that work though – they assume journalists will for them, but media is facing massive cutbacks.

We need to do better at teaching students critical thinking skills. When somebody with good critical thinking skills looks at a report published on the internet, they’ll check the sources. If one source is someone we’ve never heard of and one is from Harvard Medical School, they’ll know to trust the person from Harvard Medical School. If we teach critical thinking skills, the rest will follow.

But we can’t all be scientists and often it does feel like scientists spend most of their time communicating to other scientists. How important is it for scientists to be better storytellers?

I really think too many people don’t feel a responsibility to explain things in a way that the majority of the public will understand. If you read some esoteric botany journal or something like that, you’ll find 50 words to describe the hairiness of a plant. We like to use big, fancy words to show off and make our research look more important, when in reality, no one knows what we’re saying and it limits the impact of the research. No matter what you do, you have to make whatever your message is relatable to the average person. If you can’t explain what you’re doing to a student, you’re doing it wrong. You have to be able to communicate simply to have success in any area, especially science. No one will care about a bear if they learn can’t learn the story of that bear.

Which is why you’re not just a scientist or just an educator, you’re also a storyteller. Is that how you’ve had success in making nature matter to more people?

The pieces I’ve produced have focused on individual wolves and individual bears. And they have names and they have stories. I don’t care if the animal’s name is 926 or Snow. But by giving an organism a name and showing people its personality, you create a connection; you get people to care.

And yet so many scientists believe it’s wrong to assign names to animals or showcase personalities because it means we’re anthropomorphizing wildlife. The perception is that it’s dangerous to humanize wildlife. Obviously, you disagree.

That idea needs to be thrown out. I think the word anthropomorphic needs to be thrown out the window. If you look at the evolution, we evolved from animals – we’re still animals. To say we can’t put our emotions on animals and nature is to suggest we’re not animals and not part of nature. Which just isn’t true. You can recognize sorrow in an animal; you can recognize happiness. We have a lot of things in common. If a baby elephant falls into a waterhole and can’t get out, all mother elephants come running and try to save that one baby. That’s a mothering instinct we share. And we can relate to it. When we can relate to an animal, we can understand their plight and we can understand why caring for that animal matters. We scientists just need to get over the fear of anthropomorphizing animals – it’s a ridiculous concern and by humanizing animals we’re communicating science and, again, that’s not something we do well enough anyway.

So how do you tell the story – how do you teach the story – of predators in the food chain. Because if people empathize with the prey of the predator, or even humanize the prey, it’s very easy to see the predator as the antagonist of the story; to hate the predator.

One of the most popular movies I have on YouTube is a badger that attacks a fox family and kills the fox kits. It was also one of the saddest things I have ever seen. And people constantly say nasty things to me on YouTube, asking me why I didn’t kill the badger. Well, I didn’t interfere and I didn’t kill the badger because it’s nature. Badgers aren’t good; badgers aren’t bad. Badgers are badgers, period. They have young to feed, just like the foxes. So, you have to share and educate about the bigger picture – that predators aren’t bad. Predators just are.

But that’s a hard narrative to communicate when people have grown up with Little Red Riding Hood, right? I mean some have argued there is a direct line between the stories we consume as children and the predator management policies we support as adults.

The very first lesson I had in my very first wildlife science course was the Little Red Riding Hood syndrome: the big, bad wolf. Scientists know the big, bad wolf doesn’t exist; it’s a figment of someone’s very exaggerated imagination – someone who was just trying to tell a story to make a living. And guess what? When wolves kill to feed their pack – or predators kill in general – they too are just trying to make a living. Now, unless a grizzly bear is attacking someone, they stay out of our way, mainly eating grass, and as a result we don’t hate them as much as, say, wolves. But with wolves – who haven’t killed a human for a very long time – we compete with them for elk and moose and land we want to raise cattle on. And one of my theories about that is we see too much of ourselves in the wolf, in terms of killing, and we don’t like it. Therefore, we want to kill the wolf. If we tell a more balanced story of the predator, some people will be more receptive to their important role in the food chain. But there will be people you are never going to reach. And it’s one thing I learned as a teacher. Stories are powerful, but you can’t force people to consume them. As a teacher, students have to listen to you. You can’t tell them what to think, but you can try to make them care. I think caring is the key.

You’re right. No storyteller can force an audience to consume their stories. The success of a story will be determined by how good it is. Do you think, as a society, we tell good nature stories?

I don’t think there are that many good nature storytellers. There are some, but we need more. Whether it’s Yellowstone, or Jasper, or wherever, I think we need more people in nature, finding unique stories of nature and bringing them to life for people who can’t share the experience, in person, on that landscape. And the more stories created, the more likely we’ll find a story to connect with every type of person. When we consume stories, we learn and we get curious. Maybe someone will want to know more and knowing more leads to caring and action. That’s what my entire teaching career was built on. You can’t honestly say that students want to know more about the food cycle or electron transport. You have to present the information as a story that will spark curiosity and lead to more exploration. And, after that, you just hope it leads to something good.

What is your best advice to up and coming nature storytellers?

Just ignore the whole good vs evil thing. You don’t have to have a good animal versus a bad animal. Tell nature’s story for what it is: A struggle for existence. The average animal doesn’t have a house, it doesn’t have a heater, it doesn’t have a grocery store to buy food at. What we consider life and death is just a luxury animals will never know. Every creature serves an interesting purpose and it works each day to fulfill that purpose and just exist. And all life lives as a result. That’s the story right there.

You think good stories can help spark people to find a better balance between people and nature?

A few years ago, two people visited Yellowstone National Park and saw a bison calf by itself. They put that baby bison in the back of their car and took it to a ranger station, hoping that they could find its mother and save it. When most people heard this story, they thought this was about the dumbest thing they’d ever heard. But go watch an interview with the people who thought they were saving the bison. If you hear them explain what they did and why they did it, you think it makes perfect sense. They felt the baby bison had lost its mother, so it was walking up to humans and asking if they were its mother. The tourists felt they had the responsibility to do something, when no one else was helping. Now, that story does not have a happy ending – because people touched the bison, it was never going to be accepted back into the herd and it had to be put down. We can all argue that was the wrong thing to do, but in the minds of the tourists? It was kindness. And, actually, that’s really all that matters. If we take the time to hear different sides to stories, we’ll stop jumping to judgement. If we consume better stories, maybe we’ll act from a place of knowledge and not misguided kindness. But decency is in the hearts of most people. We just need to encourage more people to take what they care about and do something. And help people who want to do something, act with more knowledge and smarts and critical thinking. And I think good stories and good education can help on both fronts.

Different Perspectives