Tablet Pharmacy: Ever find yourself waiting endlessly at a big box pharmacy, feeling like just another number? There's a better way. At Tablet Pharmacy, they provide the personalized service you deserve. Check their competitive prices online at tabletpharmacy.ca before you even leave home. They offer free delivery and blister packaging options to make managing your medications easier than ever. With convenient locations in Parksville, Qualicum Beach, and now open in Nanaimo, near The Brick, Tablet Pharmacy has been serving Vancouver Island since 2019. Stop being just a prescription number. Experience the Tablet Pharmacy difference today. Visit them online and check their prices at tabletpharmacy.ca.

Rockin' Rhonda & The Uptown Blues Band: Peter and Dave, they're on the mics. All right, join the ride. It's gonna feel just right.

Peter McCully: Welcome back to the Pulse Community Podcast. We have more stories this week that will be of particular interest to those in the mid Vancouver Island region. I'm Peter McCully. 

 Dave Graham: And I'm Dave Graham. I'm sorry, Peter, what were you saying? I'm, I'm a little distracted, you know, preparing for Halloween and watching the Blue Jays and the rest of my life, it's taken up a lot of time.

Peter McCully: Are you decorating your place for the little ghosts and goblins in your neighbourhood? 

Dave Graham: Decorating? Hmm. Neat idea. I, but no, I've found a bowl to put the Halloween candy in and then I filled it and then, uh, I, uh, I emptied it. You're out of candy already. Those tiny chocolate bars can be very persuasive.

Turns out I have way less self-control than I thought, but moving on, what a lovely time of the year. We still have some rich colours in some trees. Others are creating leafy confetti parades, and of course we have a Blue Jays are in the World Series. 

Peter McCully: Well, it is exciting about the Blue Jays, although I have to say comparing falling leaves to a confetti parade might be a bit of a stretch. One's a celebration. The other is yard work.

Dave Graham: What can I say? You see falling leaves as yard work and I see them as a mulch-delivery system. It's all about perspective. Uh, speaking of which, we have a couple of guests this week who see the world through very unique lenses.

Peter McCully: That's right. Paul Nicklin of Nanoose Bay, co-founder of SeaLegacy.org will be here to chat about his photography, the state of the environment, and a new book he will be publishing that you can be a part of. 

Paul Nicklen: I'm taking every animal I've ever photographed and I'm going through all two and a half million images that I've shot in the last 20 years, and I've shot a lot of new work in the last few years. Any animal that I revere, any ecosystem I want to fight to protect, anything that is, to me, the raw beauty of this planet. I'm going to put between these two big covers, and in a way it's a crowdfunded book. The more people I can get to be a part of this book, they'll get their name in the book. I'll get the book at a deep discount, but it becomes our book. The more backers, supporters or people who want this book, the nicer the book I can make, and I like it that it's a book for the people. It's a book for the people who care about this planet, and I'm excited by that. 

 Dave Graham: Two and a half million images over 20 years. Let's see now some quick math. That's about 300 pictures a day.

It's that kind of dedication that lets Paul produce world-class photographic images. Then there's the artwork of the world famous Roy Henry Vickers. He will be on to talk about his art and his career. 

Roy Henry Vickers: It was my challenge to create an image and then take the pieces apart and show them as different pieces so people can learn more about this beautiful art form that is, we don't know how old it is. Some call it 5,000 years old. So the art has been around since before the flood. 

Peter McCully: We're thrilled to have these two guests, both Order of Canada recipients on the show today. But first, we have news to share as the Pulse community is expanding. 

Dave Graham: First up, we have a football podcast with Erin and Jonathan Frazier from the Courtenay Comox region. They talk NFL, including the Seahawks and Fantasy Football, 

Peter McCully: and there's a bonus downloadable recipe with each episode from Chef Jonathan. Last week's was Jacksonville style shrimp boil. Yummy.

Dave Graham: Also new this week, breaking down the housing crisis on Vancouver Island on Nonpartisan Hacks. 

Peter McCully: Parksville councillors, Joel Grenz and Sean Wood break down one of the most talked about issues in local government housing. What's the difference between market and non-market housing? Why is non-market housing so hard to build? And who actually pays for it? 

Dave Graham: Plus our Skookum Kids story this week features Captain Dave in the Mellow submarine with first mate Larry the Lobster, discovering the petroglyphs of Gabriola Island. Oh, don't forget our Skookum Kids stories. Now come with colouring pages to go along with each new episode. 

Peter McCully: Our Radio Archeology Classic radio series this week features an original episode of Gunsmoke. Marshal Matt Dillon confronts a desperate Shakespearean actor driven to murder by a lifetime of rejection.

Dave Graham: You'll find these podcast and more at thepulsecommunity.ca. 

Tablet Pharmacy: There's exciting news for book lovers fireside books in Parksville now has a second location in Port Alberni. The Bookwyrm used books are just $5 each and be sure to ask about their volume discounts. The Bookwyrm on the corner of Redford and Anderson.

Open seven days a week from 10 to five fireside books at 464 Island Highway East in Parksville is a book Dragon's Dream come true. Browse their extensive collection weekdays from nine to six and weekends 10 to five. Both locations make growing your personal library easier than ever. New books, used books, activity books, puzzle books, and much more.

Order online at Firesidebooks.ca and your books will be waiting when you arrive. Ask about returning books for a book, credit Fireside books and the Bookwyrm two locations. One amazing adventure in browsing. 

Ian Lindsay & Associates: Ian Lindsay of Lindsay and Associates has played an active role in the local community since 1979. He has been with RE/MAX Vancouver Island's most advanced real estate business network since 1996, marketing and selling residential, rural strata recreational investment, and project development real estate. Ian has received several awards recognizing his exceptional community commitment locally. As well as awards for outstanding performance and achievement from both RE/MAX International and the Vancouver Island Real Estate Board. You'll find true real estate professionals at ianlindsay.ca

Peter McCully: Our thanks to Fireside books for their support of the Pulse Community Podcast. We have some sponsorship opportunities still available for those who wish to reach the mid Vancouver Island area specifically. 

Dave Graham: Just go to our website and look for the link to contact us. We are open to hearing from more than prospective sponsors. Of course, we want to hear your reactions to our stories and suggestions for other stories we might follow. Now to introduce our first story this week, here's Marilyn.

Marilyn: Roy Henry Vickers is a celebrated first nations artist known worldwide for his vibrant prints that bridge traditional northwest coast art with contemporary style. A member of the Order of Canada, he owns Eagle Aerie Gallery in Tofino. 

Peter McCully: Thanks for joining us on the podcast today, Roy. 

Roy Henry Vickers: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. It's always exciting to speak to someone and have a conversation that's recorded and I get to listen to it after too. 

Peter McCully: That is the interesting part. There's no doubt in that. I'm always interested in the backstory of where everything began for the folks that we invite to the podcast, and I was surprised to learn that you were a Victoria firefighter for seven years before you started pursuing your art full-time. Do you remember the moment when you decided to leave the security of a really good job to create art?

Roy Henry Vickers: Yes, I certainly do. It's kind of a long story, but everyone in the fire department would've called me chief, and I thought, oh, that's interesting. I don't know if I ever want to be chief here, but they all told me I was wasting my time being a fireman. And why don't I just be an artist? And I argued with them saying, I can do both.

I got a good job here. Got lots of time off. I can do both. They were on me so hard that I finally realized. One of them said, if you keep working here, you're going to be making money at this steady job, and you're not gonna work as hard with your art. I had been to Cassan Art School in Hazleton for one year, and I went back to the fire department.

Then I took a leave of absence and I took a holiday and went to Mexico and on my way back from Mexico. I was driving along the desert, something hit me and it was about being in Mexico where people don't have unemployment insurance, they don't have what we have in Canada. This question came into my mind.

What are you afraid of, Roy? It's true that if you didn't have a job, you would do more work. You'd be free to do more of your art and creation and. I pulled over to the side of the road and had a huge lump in my throat. I got out of my Volkswagen van and walked through a fence and out into the desert, and I dropped to my knees crying.

I didn't know why, so I'm wondering, what is this all about? And I'm masking, what is this? What is this? You should follow some of the advice people have given you and. Don't be afraid because you live in a beautiful country and get out there and do it. Call the fire department and tell them you're not coming back.

So when I got back to Victoria, two days later, I called the fire department and the rest is history.

Peter McCully:  I was quite surprised to learn, Roy, that you were colourblind initially, which led you to work primarily with black, white, and red. How did you eventually overcome the challenge, and how did it influence your artistic development and your art itself?

Roy Henry Vickers: I never knew I was colourblind until I was going into the RCMP. I'm a horseman. I love horses, and I was going to be in the RCMP and ride around the world and get paid to do it. I failed my medical because I couldn't see the numbers in the little circle full of coloured dots. I was told that I was colourblind to all hues of colour.

Partially colourblind. I could see colours, but I couldn't see the numbers and I failed that. And I went to my art teacher, William West from Oak Bay High School, and I said, Mr. West, I am partially colourblind to all hues of colour. And he said, no wonder you use such strong colours. You just use the colours that you see.

It's not a hindrance to you. It's actually, it gives you, uh, an advantage of having your own style and your own use of colours. The black and red colours I used because those are the traditional colours of simien and Haida and coag people, and they're the simplest pigments, charcoal from fires and red from ochre from the earth.

So black and red were the colours that I chose, and when I began my artwork, it was all very traditional. And all of my studies were about who I was and where I was from. And this ancient village, over 5,000 years old, it was this massive input of information kept coming to me and coming to me, and coming to me.

And so I realized that colour is good, and however I see colour and however I use it is good because there is no one like you in the world. So anyone listening to this, there is nobody like you in the whole world. So if you come to understand who you are and you be creative from that place, you'll be creating things, whether it's words or colours or paints or conversations, you'll be doing things no one else can do because there's nobody like it.

So give me the confidence to strike out and do whatever I felt like doing. 

Peter McCully: Your signature Eagle Moon imagery appears throughout your work. As a matter of fact, it's on your nephew James' Vickers album artwork. He was here a few weeks ago telling us about that. Can you share the cultural and personal significance of the Eagle Moon?

Roy Henry Vickers: Among the Ki Kala people that I'm from, there are four clans, eel, whale, raven, and wolf. And you are who your mother is. And my mother, even though she was of English descent, when she moved to Ki Kala and married my father and had myself, they adopted her into the Eagle Clan. And so I was born eagle. And Eagle has always been with me through my whole life.

There's another whole pile of stories about eagles and eagle feathers and on ghosts. I always had this challenge to create something strong and something eagle. I was in Tofino and there was a full moon. I remembered my grandpa teaching me the 13 moons of the year and how different people in different parts of the province have different names for the moons because they're all about what we do and how we live from nature.

And so I chose the challenge to create an Eagle Moon.

Peter McCully: Roy, you're primarily known for Prince, but you're an accomplished carver. The salmon totem that you created for the 1994 Commonwealth Games still stands as a landmark. Is there a difference or do you go about it differently, creating public art versus something for the gallery?

Roy Henry Vickers: No, creativity is creativity, and you go with the flow, you go with the inspiration, and when you put art in the gallery, it's public art. When you create a totem for your ancestors or from your ancestors, it's public art. The difference is when you're carving it, it's about how you use your hands and it's muscles, and you can think about different things when you're carving because it, it's very tactile.

I am free to think and allow visions and images to come into my mind while I'm carving. While I'm carving, I actually am inspired to create other pieces and inspiration is divine. Inspiration comes into us, into this part of our brain, and it excites us in all our emotions, in all of our ways. And so I've always followed the inspiration that hits me.

So I love carving. I love painting. I love drawing more than anything else. So I have to draw the carving before I do the carving. 

Peter McCully: You've got a colouring book out and it's, um, inspired for adults and kids. Features 42 of your most iconic works, adapted for colouring, which is interesting. What drew you to create a colouring book at the stage of your career?

Roy Henry Vickers: The older I get, the more I treasure my childhood. And those things that were taught me as a child. What I always received from my family was either a colouring book or a paint by number book, and that's how I didn't know that I was colourblind. 'cause I always painted by number, so I do a drawing and then filled in the numbers.

When I started painting, all of my paintings are paint by number, and so a colouring book came to me inspired by the crew at Harbor Publishing and by my good friend. Robert Lucky bud, and we just thought big kids and little kids are gonna enjoy this colouring book. 

Peter McCully: I have a copy of it right here, and it's fantastic.

It's oversized, very high quality stock, perforated pages. This is not like a kid's standard colouring book. 

Roy Henry Vickers: It isn't. It's a big kid, little kid colouring book. And now I want to create a colouring book just for little kids.

Peter McCully:  This one includes both simple and challenging designs. I would say. What do you hope that different skill levels of colourists will discover about your art through this very hands-on experience.

Roy Henry Vickers: In the colouring book, there is one specific piece that explains elements of traditional design that all of us artists who follow traditional design use, and when uneducated people or people ignorant to traditional northwest coast are, look at it and they look at something one person does and something that another person does.

They can't tell the difference between what is really good and someone who's just learning how to use traditional design. So it was my challenge to create an image and then take the pieces apart and show them as different pieces so people can learn more about this beautiful art form that is, we don't know how old it is.

Cassan art is 5,000 years old, so the art has been around since before the flood. 

Peter McCully: One thing I thought that was brilliant was if you go to your website and look for the colouring book, the pages correspond with the colouring book so you can see how you've created it. Someone who's colouring a page can either look before or after for inspiration or how they did.

Roy Henry Vickers: and I'm excited to see what someone would do with the colouring book without looking at what I did with the colouring book.

Peter McCully: So you have no problem with people interpreting your work through their own colour choices. I actually hope that happens more than people using my colour choices.

Roy Henry Vickers:  It would be interesting, wouldn't it, to see your art in a whole new light. It would. It will be. I know, and I hope this interview and when people listen to this, they'll be encouraged to send images to Roy Henry Vickers.com and the gallery can share them with me.

Peter McCully: Do you see colouring books as a kind of a gateway to introduce people to indigenous art and northwest culture 

Roy Henry Vickers: And how this artist uses colour. Also, I go back to the word inspire or inspiration. It's a very beautiful word, and it comes from the Latin inspirus, which literally translates to the breath of God, respirating coming into us.

I know that when I create something from inspiration, it's greater than the sum of its parts. It's greater than me. It's greater than all of my teachers. I hope that this colouring book will lead people to work not from intellectual work, but from inspired images that come into their minds. 

Peter McCully: I wanted to ask you about a painting that I've seen, a meeting of chiefs, which was chosen as British Columbia's official gift to Queen Elizabeth II in 1987.

What was that moment like seeing your art represent the province and culture on such a a large stage, a world stage?  

Roy Henry Vickers: This is what it was like. It moved me to tears. I felt that I had met. The responsibility of being this artist who has roots in ancient part of the Pacific Northwest, and this would help people in the Commonwealth.

I was not only humble but inspired. Good question.

Peter McCully: Roy, you've been a spokesperson for recovery from addictions for many years and founded Vision Quest. So how has your personal journey with recovery. Influenced your art and community involvement.  

Roy Henry Vickers: When we go through trauma, no matter who we are or where we come from, parts of us will run away and hide.

To deal with trauma, we must go and find that person, part of me that ran away and bring them back to make me whole. That's recovery. And it's ancient. When I look at tools that doctors before colonization. They had what's called a soul catcher, and artists created this soul catcher that was a bone with holes at both ends.

And the doctors, which were psychologists, helped people by going after parts of the soul that ran away and capturing them in the soul catcher and giving them back to the person. So recovery for me. Is more important now than it's ever been. When those children's bodies were found in Kamloops. There were so many people across Canada who were confronted with the trauma that they went through.

For me, this work is continuous and we are all leaders. How we work and what we do leads others. If they see that it's something that can help them, it leads them to follow us. My recovery of ghost parts of me that ran away is ongoing, and it'll keep on going until I stop breathing. I hope that it inspires others to do the same.

Peter McCully: Speaking of inspiration, Roy, looking at the art world today, what advice would you give to emerging indigenous artists trying to find their own voice in their own way? 

Roy Henry Vickers: First of all, in this colonial world that we live in and are brought up in, the word indigenous is applied to the original inhabitants.

So like my father's ancestors from British Columbia, however, we are all one. There are not different races of human beings. There's one race of human beings and we are all indigenous to somewhere in this world. My advice to people is when you want to create, follow inspiration, feel the hair go up on the back of your neck and the goosebumps come to your arms and then create from that place.

And like my art teacher said, William West. Then you will do something no one else in the world can do. 

Peter McCully: Let's look at the other side of that coin for a second. Roy. If someone has never experienced indigenous art before, where would you suggest they start?

Roy Henry Vickers: with inspired? Look at the little image in the colouring book with the elements of design and draw them.

Peter McCully: Thank you very much for your time today. I really appreciate it and I'm enjoying the colouring book. Instead of scribbling on a notepad, I'm going to take a shot at a couple of images here and see how they turn out. 

Roy Henry Vickers: Awesome. Thank you for the inspiration and for helping me to realise that we just keep on going and do what we can do to make the world a better place, 

Dave Graham: Our thanks to Roy Henry Vickers for sharing his time and wisdom with us. His art reminds us of the deep connections between culture, nature, and creativity. And his new colouring book offers a wonderful way for people to engage with his timeless images. 

Peter McCully: This is The Pulse Community Podcast available on Amazon, iHeart, apple, TikTok, Spotify, and YouTube. Plus, you'll find us on Instagram and Facebook. 

Dave Graham: In the episode before November 11th, a war veteran will pass along some thoughts for those of us who have never experienced battle. And on another future episode, we'll be featuring news of the upcoming Tigh na Mara Toy Drive for the SOS.  

Peter McCully: Actor, writer, soon to be producer Chelah Horsdal joins us to talk about her various TV and movie roles, including that of the Federation President in Star Trek Discovery.

Windsor Plywood French Creek: The Pulse Community Podcast is brought to you in part by Windsor Plywood in French Creek, specializing in hard to source interior and exterior home finishing products. Including flooring, doors and moldings and exterior project materials such as yellow, cedar, Windsor, plywood, French Creek carries high quality, responsibly sourced products and are committed to providing outstanding value and personalized one-on-one service to all of our customers.

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Experience the tablet pharmacy difference today. Visit them online and check their prices at tabletpharmacy.ca. 

 Dave Graham: I have to mention Canada's team, the Blue Jays, and how exciting it is to see them doing so well after so long. You know, I stopped following the Jays when the players went on strike back in the mid 1990s, but then I had a change of heart just a couple of weeks ago.

I just tuned in for the fun of it and I watched the Jays score. 13 runs against Seattle. Since then, I have convinced myself that I am key to their success. If I don't watch, they can't win. It's a big responsibility, but I'm handling it pretty well. I understand how nonsensical this might sound, but hey, that's sports.

Even though the Dodgers are heavily favored, all we have to do is look at Game one of the World Series to know that the Jays could go all the way. I have actually forgotten how exciting watching sports can be. Now we have some exciting news to share in regards to the opportunity to support a big project by one of the island zone.

Here's Marilyn. 

Marilyn: Paul Nicklin of Nanoose Bay is a Canadian photographer and marine biologist, co-founder of Sea Legacy. He documents threatened ecosystems through powerful imagery that connects millions to ocean conservation. His work has earned many awards, including the Order of Canada. BBC. Wildlife Photographer of the Year and Hall of Fame induction.

Peter McCully: We appreciate you making time for us in your busy schedule to be part of the podcast today, Paul. 

Paul Nicklen: Yeah, thanks Peter. It's great to be here. 

Peter McCully: You chose to leave your career as a marine biologist very famously to pursue photography full-time. Was there an aha moment that made you realize that the camera could be more of a powerful tool for conservation than a microscope?

Paul Nicklen: I don't know if there's an aha moment. It was definitely an evolution. I was out all the time studying caribou and wolves and wolverine and lakes, and polar bears, and grizzly bears, and I just couldn't believe as an animal lover, somebody who's grown up his whole life rear rearing and loving nature, that I was taking the beauty of these animals and just converting them into data sets.

They're just numbers on a piece of paper. And of course you need the science and you need the data. But I wasn't feeding my soul. And then also it was a moment late four years into my biology career. Then I realized all we were doing is managing hunter's rights to basically harvest as much of the population as you can before you drive it down.

We were constantly getting it wrong. Case in point, the bath's caribou herd, which was under our jurisdiction back in the nineties, it was 480,000 animals, was the last time I was involved in the census, and now they're fighting over who gets to kill the last 5,000. So that's a, you know, a 99% decline. I just thought there's gotta be a better way.

I gotta be better value added to the conservation community. And I thought if I could just bridge the gap between important science and the public by getting a job with a little known magazine like National Geographic, then I have a chance at least putting the stories out there in front of the international court of public opinion and hopefully making a difference.

It is all about storytelling, isn't it? Absolutely. We're a culture that's hardwired for storytelling. We have been from drawing paintings on cave walls and running around the fire. To me, growing up with the Inuit and watching them tell stories and soapstone carvings and lithograph paintings and myself feverously drawing and painting as a kid and just love telling the stories.

Now it's just with a camera. 

Peter McCully: Many of those iconic images that you've shot over the years have required you to return to the same location, to witness change that may have happened. Have you returned to the area on Baffin Island where you grew up to document change? And if so, what have you discovered? 

Paul Nicklen: I haven't been back too much, but the little town where I grew up on the south side of Baffin Island, I've been to a Owat many times more worked around other areas up in Kana, Greenland, Arctic Bay, and all these places where I traveled When we did our polar bear research, you don't have to look very far to see the change.

You just talk to the hunters about how. They've never seen the ice break up that way in hundreds of years. They haven't seen, you know, these movements of animals like this. They haven't seen this type of weather. Or you go to Antarctica to work with a guy like Dion Poise, who is actually conceived and born in Antarctica by his very famous French sailing father, Jerome Poise.

For him to say that he's never in his entire life of being there every year, has never seen so much rain and it's just pouring rain in which is causing penguin populations to collapse. So yeah, we are seeing change. Dramatically, and that's just in our lifetime and on the global timescale, that's just a blink of an eye that this change is happening So quickly.

Peter McCully: When you and your partner, Christina Mittermeier, co-founded Sea Legacy in 2014, what gap in ocean conservation did you see that other organizations might not have been filling?

Paul Nicklen: We were very busy shooting big assignments for National Geographic Magazine. By then, I think I was on my 18th assignment. It was an incredible thing. It's like being in the NHL, but there's only one team in this National Geographic, and if you kicked off that team, you're done. Where do you go from there?

You work extremely hard. You go from story to story, and you might be on the story for one year, maybe two years, and by the time that story came out, you were already onto the next story, and there was no conservation follow up. There was no policy team or analysts or conservationists or the team around you to help push forward to a conservation win.

And it was at that time, in about 2012, I went in kicking and screaming. I hated the idea of starting a social media account. I did not want to get onto Instagram or Facebook, but I did it anyway. And I think one day I put up a picture of a narwhal on the National Geographic feed. I said, if you wanna see what Narwals look like underwater, go to my feed Paul Nicklin.

And boom, I had 55,000 new followers in a morning. And I was like, okay, this is an amazing opportunity. And then Christina and I said, look at that. Geo's great, but it's too slow. And if we could just. Beat the daily drum on social media about the stories that we care about, and we had the photography skills, we had the storytelling skills.

All of a sudden now we had the audience and then we aligned with other conservation groups, first Nation groups, whomever, and really started to work towards a conservation win. I always say that it feels great to see your pictures on the cover of National Geographic, for example, or to win awards, but nothing tastes as good as having a conservation win and having done that through storytelling and photography.

Peter McCully: And now it's funding sustainable development projects. So how do you balance the role of a storyteller with that? Of organizational leader and fundraiser? 

Paul Nicklen: We're kind of haggard, especially, we take no salary on top of all that. We have to run our own successful businesses to fuel it all. But in the beginning, I thought fundraising was going to be hard, turned out to be extremely difficult.

There's been days where we've been slowly thinking about just giving up 'cause it's too hard to fundraise. No one seems to want to pay for storytelling or. Journalism or conservation. Storytelling. And now we just had these beautiful angel donors come in and take care of us and the boat and expeditions and the team, and we're now the smallest our team has ever been, but we're mighty, we're powerful.

And that's just because we have built such wonderful partners and alignments in the industry that we don't have to do all the heavy lifting. We don't have to see it from concept to finish with all the policy and the work and the letter writing and attending meetings. We do the storytelling. We really stick to the video, this content creation.

We shoot our assets at the highest level and then we use those to really initiate great conversations around conservations for the last couple years anyway, and it's working really well. We have probably anywhere from 50 to 200 amazing partners that we work with and, and we're just very proud of the great work everyone's doing together

Peter McCully: You've just returned from Climate Week in New York City. I noted during that time that Pope Leo spoke out against critics who. Quote unquote ridicule, those who speak of global warming. 

Paul Nicklen: 1950 is I think approaching 300 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and now we're at 440 parts per million, and sure we have wars and we have famine and droughts, and we have everything else going on in the world.

Political unrest and crazy leadership. If we don't address climate change, nothing else is gonna matter. In a hundred years from now, we've already lost 69% of the biodiversity on this planet in the last 50 years. I always worry that we're gonna go from being ignorant to it, to slightly being aware of it, but not caring about it to going, oh, it's too late.

It's every man for himself. I feel like we're starting to come to that and there's nothing scarier than a desperate human, and this climate change will drive us deep into desperation very quickly. We just spoke at Google's Heit Geist, and everything's about AI and all that, but also it's just a lot of very brilliant people in the room thinking about this.

22 years ago, I did a story for National Geographic, and I couldn't get a scientist to go on the record to say that climate change was real and it was caused by humans. At least we're all talking about it now and then now that a lot of the smartest people in the world are looking for solutions. And so I'm hopeful, and my only job is just through photography, is to keep creating reverence for all the beautiful things that still exist.

When you stand next to a 12,000 pound elephant named Craig, who was 52 years old, one of the last 20 superusers on the planet. Or to free, dive down 50 feet deep and stare a mother and hump back calf in the eye, or to be sitting there next to a, a sleeping sperm whale in the middle of the Caribbean sea.

And the awe and the beauty that I feel is, I know it's, it may sound corny to a lot of people, especially religious folk, but for me, when you see the beauty that I see, I grew up Catholic. I was an altar boy and I did all that stuff and. We would fabricate in our minds, what does heaven look like? What's this dream world that's being slated for us?

What does that look like? But when you spend as much time in nature as I do in the company of these incredibly beautiful, complex, charismatic animals. These other nations that are just travelling on this earth with us, and you just realize that you could not fabricate, dream, imagine a place as beautiful, raw, and fragile as what's in front of us right now.

So I always say, for me, heaven is here and now this is our one chance. So to be living out this life, wasting this planet, waiting for this next life to me is foolish for people to get out there and reconnect with nature and go, wow, you're right. This doesn't get any more powerful and beautiful. 

 Peter McCully: You mentioned the word reverence. You recently created an exhibit Reverence, which is large scale images. Is that a travelling exhibit? 

Paul Nicklen: It will be. Christina is ahead of me. She did her book called Hope last year, and now I'm doing a book called Reverence, so it's going to be Hope and Reverence and she's just travelling her show through Italy and I'll be following right after her.

And we have a show in London coming up. We just had an art show called Hope and Reverence in New York and Central Park last week for Climate Week. The reason we do what we do is because we want a microphone. We wanna get on tops of mountains and we wanna scream out with a megaphone to say, people wake up, this is what's here, we're losing it.

This is our last stand. For this beautiful planet, you have to have hope. As soon as you have no hope, you have despair and depression and anxiety, and the only antidote to that is to become active and to really just explore the beauty of what's around us. Could you tell us a little more about the book?

It's going to be my dream book with all my books I've done for National Geographic and the last big book I did, they're all polar. You know, I was National Geographic Polar expert, and I did all Antarctica Arctic for them secretly in my heart. I've been travelling the globe for decades and in all oceans around the world, all creatures, big and small.

Just as you call, I'm sitting here editing seawalls. I'm taking every animal I've ever photographed, and I'm going through all two and a half million images that I've shot. In the last 20 years, and I've shot a lot of new work in the last few years. Any animal that I revere, any ecosystem I want to fight to protect, anything that is, to me, the raw beauty of this planet.

I'm going to put between these two big covers, and in a way it's a crowdfunded book. The more people I can get to be a part of this book, they'll get their name in the. Get the book at a deep discount, but it becomes our book. The more backers, supporters or people who want this book, the nicer the book I can make, and I like it that it's a book for the people.

It's a book for the people who care about this planet, and I'm excited by that. 

Peter McCully: For those of us who are amateur photographers, and I know you started with your mom's Louise's Pentax, K 1000, same camera I started with, what do you shoot with these days? 

Paul Nicklen: You know, I would say the whole evolution of all the cameras.

I got the K 1000, which was a great way to start 'cause everything was so manual. You'd spend half an hour just trying to get your focus lines to line up and, but it was great training. And then from there, I went Nikon for many years. And then I shot Canon for National Geographic for many years. But in the last seven years I've been exclusively Sony just because, A, they take very good care of us, but B, they've also led the charge on the mirrorless cameras.

I used to shoot that Cannon one DX, and it would send birds flying from miles away. The shutter was so loud and now these cameras are shooting 30 frames a second on silent mode with 61 megapixel files. Like back in my narwhal days, I was shooting two frames a second and it would buffer out after five.

You know, I'm there with my airplane flying over the narwhals and. I wish I could go back in time. Yeah. With the camera gear I have now to shoot back then. But yeah, it's evolved very quickly and we're the lucky recipients of the best bad one in the world between Nikon Canon and Sony and letting them have it out.

But the mirrorless cameras right now are the best and definitely Sony's leading that charge. 

Peter McCully: Do you see artificial intelligence AI as a threat to the authenticity and impact of conservation photography, or could it become a tool? 

Paul Nicklen: Definitely is a tool when it comes to. I'm using it all the time right now when I wanna research projects and where to go and who to contact.

And as a research tool, it's amazing. But I have friends of mine who I respect greatly, who are journalists who've gone to the dark side. They're now putting out imagery, using their images and other images that are fake. And I think it can get very misleading very quickly as we're seeing in the political fights around us, that people can just create whatever they want.

It's the same thing in the nineties when game farm photography came out, everybody could go rent a snow leopard, a lion, a wolf, a wolverine, all in a day, pay 500 bucks and shoot animals that you would spend your entire life looking for. And at that time, I made a decision that the more people went there.

I thought that was going to be a very saturated, diluted world, and there was going to be a great demand for authentic rare. Unique imagery, and that's the path I went on. I went after the narwhals, the spirit bears, the bowhead whales, the sea walls. I'm grateful I did, and I'm going to do the same here. I mean, I could sit here and do some very creative, funky AI stuff with my own work.

Maybe it sells. But I just think, to me, there's nothing more beautiful than nature, billions of years of evolution to arrive at this perfection. When you think of these animals, you could not fabricate design, sketch. I don't care what computer ai, quantum physics stuff you have at your fingertips, you could never create anything.

A tiny fraction as beautiful as what we have right here. So my goal is just to try and capture the beauty of the natural world in the best way I can. 

Peter McCully: Another person who works in the yard and conservation spaces, Robert Bateman, I understand he was an inspiration for you and your youth.  

Paul Nicklen: Massive inspiration.

I went to uvic. I thought I was going to be a scientist. That's it. And all of a sudden discovered scuba diving at Uvic and became obsessed with underwater. But at the same time, I loved hiking and I had my mom's K 1000. And when I wasn't doing all that, there was no internet back then. But I would go into all the galleries downtown in Victoria and I would just stare at his prince for hours.

Because what I loved about his stuff was his ecosystem approach to these animals. So anybody could paint a full frame picture of a wolf and say, oh, there's a wolf, there's a bear. But to him, to take the mood of a puma, a cougar sitting in a cave in a snowstorm with the rocks and with the raven sitting up in a tree and, and that's how I saw nature.

And now we really influenced my photography from a young age. And now, just recently, I was in Patagonia last year, and I'm sitting in a cave. With a puma in a snowstorm, just the two of us. And the snow's dumping maybe a foot of snow in an hour is heavy snow. And this puma is sitting there with, its back to the cave, watching the world go by.

And I'm sitting in there with it, but it felt like I would crawled into a Robert Bateman painting and someone hit the switch and it was just a really beautiful moment. 

Peter McCully: That's what they call a full circle moment, Paul. Absolutely. You and Christina recently received an Emmy award for Outstanding Nature documentary for an episode of the Photographer series from National Geographic.

Did you get all dressed up and go to Hollywood? 

Paul Nicklen: No, we did not. Actually, I don't think we were invited. Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarhelyi are friends and good storytellers and they've won tonnes of Emmys and it's not why we do what we do. We don't do this to get the awards and if. Our conservation work, real, authentic, genuine, zero acting, zero performing conservation work is worth an Emmy, then that's exciting and that means what we're doing is somewhat cool.

We're not trying to be cool, we're just trying to win when it comes to protecting nature. So yeah, to get that recognition or was great and the storytellers got the Emmy, we didn't get the Emmy as characters, but just the overall story is interesting enough for people to get that achievement then.

Wonderful. 

Peter McCully: This past summer Mountain galleries at the Empress Hotel hosted you and Christina for a day of art and storytelling and environmental inspiration. Could you tell us about that? 

Paul Nicklen: You know, we travel around the world. We're in galleries around the world. We're in many different countries. We lecture around the world and.

It's just so lovely when my favourite place in the world. Canada is a much smaller country, so there's a lot less fanfare and nice Canadians are very humble and understated and generally soft spoken. And I just think to have this opportunity to have a big show in Whistler, which was great, I'm standing there and Trevor Linden, Mr.

Hockey himself, walks by and pretty exciting. And just a really humble, warm, kind man, everybody. It was wonderful. I love being around Canadians and, and just to have our art show there. And then we did another art show this fall in Victoria we had a little book signing in Victoria. But yeah, we're working with Opheis who owns a series of galleries mostly in Canada, one in Sun Valley.

We're gonna keep doing a lot more work with them because they do a great job and they sell art, which keeps us out in the field doing what we love to do and what we're good at and it's a perfect, another perfect circle moment there. Peter, 

Peter McCully: we should mention for those folks who put their donations where their hearts are, that you made some important changes to see legacy in terms of being a registered charity.

In the past year or so, 

Paul Nicklen: we've had many evolutions of the organization and now we are. Registered charity you can give to us both in Canada and the United States. And it's just crazy how $500 billion goes to philanthropy, for example, in the United States alone. So small philanthropic country in the world, and 33% of that goes to religion.

And I think 16% goes to arts. And that's good. But at the very bottom of that is 1% goes to the environment, and that includes all horses, dogs, cats. It's like a tiny fraction of funding. Goes to conservation and especially communications and storytelling. And when a lot of these big NGOs, these big NGOs like Conservation International or whatever, they have their bucket for communications.

And that's not storytelling usually. That's just fundraising. And if we are going to save this planet, we're going to have to turn that pyramid on its head. It's going to have to be 33% of philanthropic donations goes to a. Protecting for our planet. It's our one and only home and it's burning. And you know, as we're seeing in the fires around the world and all the bad news after another and all, we're sitting here shuffling stories and shuffling our chairs and trying to get a different view and look a different way while ignoring the foundation of the problem.

We're just going to have to wake up and face this hard. And it's scary. It's scary to care. I always say It sucks to care, but once you start, you can't stop. You have no choice. 

Peter McCully: I read somewhere that you said you would willingly exchange all the awards that you've won for one image that helps change the world and saves the planet.

Do you believe you've captured the image yet or are you still searching for it? 

Paul Nicklen: No, definitely I haven't because we're still fighting every day to break down the walls of apathy. I equate it in my social media to boxing. You have to have a nice rhythm of beautiful, entertaining, educational, inviting people into the conversation.

And once you're in the trust of your base, then you can hit 'em with an image or imagery or a video that can punch 'em in the face so hard 'cause it's so graphic and so awful, the look at. But by then you've earned their trust and they want more. They want to come on the journey with you. It's the rhythm and the pacing of imagery that does that.

When we put up that starving polar bear, the video that had 2 billion views. A quarter of the planet saw that, and that's exceptional. But did that change, climate change? Did it win? I just want to wake up tomorrow morning and be able to push a button and save all this, but it's not going to be that. It's just going to be constantly beating this drum every day.

And some days you get burnt out and down and out. But other times I'd sit here and look at my pictures and just have nothing but gratitude for a very fortunate life lived. And I get to see all these beautiful creatures and I'm going to do that till the day I die for sure. 

Dave Graham: Thanks to Paul Nicklin for being a part of the Pulse community.

His dedication to documenting and protecting our planet's most vulnerable ecosystems is truly remarkable. Through his lens, we see not just beauty, but a call to action. Our story notes contain links for more information regarding Paul's new book and how you can be a part of it. 

So Peter, here we are coming to the end of another podcast.

You know, I should probably head out to get some more candy for the kids. 

Peter McCully: Well, there's time left before Halloween. Maybe you should wait and then you won't be tempted to eat it all. 

Dave Graham: Oh, I have the answer. Two boxes. I'll have one for the kids, one for me. 

Peter McCully: Oh, why don't you get some candies you don't particularly care for And then maybe you'll have some of those left for the kids. 

Dave Graham: That's, oh, that's rich candy. I don't like, where do you come up with this stuff? Maybe I should get three boxes just in case there's a rush. You never know. 

Peter McCully: Okay, folks, thanks for joining us and see you next time on the Pulse Community Podcast.

Rockin' Rhonda & The Uptown Blues Band: Here comes Peter. Here comes Dave. Oh, listen. Bringing stories, making waves. No missing. Spinning tales in the podcast cave. So much laughs and insights everywhere. Peter and Dave, they're on the mics. All right, join the ride. It's gonna feel just right.