Paths Crossed: Andy Mann
The renowned conservationist, National Geographic photographer, and filmmaker is on an expedition of a lifetime to protect our ocean.
Earlier this year, I drove north to Provincetown, Cape Cod, to check out a series of panel discussions co-hosted by one of my favorite magazines, Atmos, and a local nonprofit called Twenty Summers. It was a beautiful, community-oriented, and incredibly shifting weekend for me. And when I realized that Andy Mann was one of the speakers on the ocean conservation panel, I was psyched, having long admired his creative pursuits and the work of SeaLegacy, the nonprofit he co-founded with Paul Nicklen and Christina Mittermeier. When he first sat down in front of me that weekend, inside a restored barn full of storied architectural and art history, I most definitely leaned forward and told him as much.
Through the lens of Andy Mann, I have traveled to the deepest parts of the ocean, a place that has always captured my imagination. A renowned marine conservationist and National Geographic explorer who has worked across all seven continents, he employs his art for the sake of advocacy. He first found entry into a life of adventure and storytelling via the climbing community, but soon discovered that using his photography and filmmaking to galvanize action around our rapidly changing planet was his purpose.
Only 8 percent of our ocean is currently under some form of protection, and of that, only 3 percent has been afforded protection high enough to have any benefit to its biodiversity. By 2030, the global community initiative 30x30 has set a goal of protecting 30 percent of our land and sea. That’s the work ahead. Here, I deep dive with Andy to learn about his path from the Chesapeake Bay to Colorado, from Russia’s Franz Josef Land to deep-sea submersibles, and how this led to his life’s work—meeting with presidents, prime ministers, and ocean academics the world over to lobby on behalf of our most precious ecosystem.
I’ll kick it off with a fun one: What is your definition of “adventure”?
I actually have a pretty clear definition for adventure, and that's that there has to be elements of unknown. It comes from doing all these climbing expeditions with this guy named Mike Libecki. And he says without mystery, there is no adventure. So it's the idea that things not going as planned is when the adventure starts. Otherwise it's just a trip or a catered experience. There's lots to gain from all that too. But I think real adventure comes from a sense of unknown, a sense of vulnerability within you—as much emotional as physical. Sometimes a conversation that's unexpected is a huge adventure.
As someone who is very clear on his purpose—working entirely on ocean conservation wins—can you start by sharing a bit about the early markers that shaped your path?
I grew up in rural Virginia with a love for the Chesapeake Bay and fishing the tributaries there. I studied fisheries management in college in Auburn, Alabama. After school, back in Virginia, I worked for the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries doing conservation work and data collection around the Chesapeake Bay. At 23 years old, my funding ran out, so I was at a crossroads: Do I go back to school and pursue this?
But I really just love being in the field. So I moved to Colorado with a bunch of friends, and quickly fell in love with the mountains and rock climbing specifically. And in an effort to find a way to fully live the dirtbag climber lifestyle, I started photographing and documenting these adventures my friends and I were going on, while also learning from the community of filmmakers and photographers in the adventure space. I started a production company called Three Strings at that time with fellow climbing photographers and filmmakers in the industry—Keith Ladzinski [your eyes are missing out if you don’t follow his photos too], Cory Richards…
Ah, I’m in the middle of his book right now.
Yeah, so we were roommates, Cory and I. And actually Cory is the person that got me into National Geographic on my first assignment. There was a whole horde of us, Jimmy Chin, Renan Ozturk, Keith, Cory, myself—adventure climbing photographers who got shepherded into Nat Geo around the same time.
That’s a talented crew. What was that first assignment with Cory?
We went to a place called Franz Josef Land, Russia. It was a polar science expedition. So I used my chops and skills as an expedition adventure storyteller to apply them to promoting parts of our planet, following field scientists around and documenting natural history. And that's when I really found my purpose with the camera.
I was going to ask you about a first ‘a-ha’ moment, but it sounds like this was it.
Yeah, it's funny because your platform’s name is so relevant, Paths Crossed. I can pin all of my ‘a-ha’ moments to when my path crossed with somebody, or some opportunity, and changed everything for me.
There’s a neuroscientist by the name of Lisa Miller who studies science and spirituality, and I love that she terms these people our “trail angels.”
That's why I just tell people that if you follow any path or passion long enough, and you’re prepared for those moments, you'll find some version of success and growth and satisfaction in your journey. But yeah, a big moment was definitely leaving Virginia and moving to Colorado at 23, not having any overhead, the world as my oyster. I didn't study photography and I had never rock climbed before then, so it wasn't like I saw any of that coming.
A few of you in this community have recounted to me such similar stories about their start—just picking up that camera while climbing. It seems like an alchemy of the still-analog, early-internet days. We’re the same age and actually, at 24, I also took my first leap toward my inner adventurous voice. I left my first publishing job in Charlottesville, Virginia, put my stuff in storage, bought a ticket to SF, and slept on my friend’s floor while waiting tables. So what happens next for you out west?
Another big moment for me was when I learned to be a filmmaker. I wouldn't have called myself one at the time. But I learned to make a video, which changed things business-wise. Keith and I were shooting this big education conference that his brother worked at. It was as boring as you might think, but of course I said yes to everything at that time. It was in Anaheim, California, in a convention center where people were talking about what the cloud was and how it was going to transform everything. Our job was to roll around and photograph people mingling, speakers gesturing. But I remember they were also like, We need you to go interview these people and put together a little video. DSLRs had a record button at that point. I shot some B-roll, edited it, and delivered it. It was terrible, but I learned so much from that experience that I started doing that in the field with climbing, and there weren't many people able to do both. So that was something that transformed me from being a photographer to being a storyteller.
THE OCEAN AS OUR MOST CRUCIAL STORYBOOK
You noted that the Franz Josef Land expedition with National Geographic showed you new purpose. What lit you up about it?
That expedition, following around field scientists in this remote polar region by the North Pole, allowed me to really learn the story I was there to tell. I'm learning from these field biologists about this rapidly changing environment. Cory shot a story for the magazine. But we also made a film. We were with this organization, also at National Geographic, called Pristine Seas. We came back and really lobbied hard for the protection of Franz Josef Land with these assets. And soon after, it became the largest Arctic national park in the world, and our team was given this prestigious award called the Crystal Compass Award from the geographical society. So for me this was shifting, that the images and stories that I made in Franz Josef Land were used as tools to lobby for the protection of the islands, but also of polar species and regions in general.
And didn’t you mention to me that your nonprofit, SeaLegacy, was born out of this urgency and desire to route these photo assets as you wished?
Yes, one of the frustrations with National Geographic at the time was the fact that the assets and the images and the stories were embargoed until the issue runs, and sometimes even six months or a year after that. But these issues on the ground are very timely and sensitive. People could be using this story and these images to fight for protections of land or animals immediately. The idea of SeaLegacy was: Let's create a foundation and nonprofit in the conservation space where we can deploy storytellers and tell these stories and deliver these assets in real time.
And how's SeaLegacy going now?
It's great, it's been an awesome ride so far. We've been together for about 10 years, and it’s actually undergoing some change right now, like any evolving artistic partnership. SeaLegacy will be a little more focused on what's happening around Paul and Mitty’s [co-founders Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier’s] campaigns and their lives. And I'm branching out to work with a lot of other organizations and still do what's called impact, campaign-driven media work. We have an amazing audience. For the last 10 years, we've been able to galvanize global action and inspire people. We’ve put some conservation wins on the shelf and spotlighted a lot of issues.
Ocean conservation is so multipronged, with myriad issues. It can feel overwhelming I think. Can you root us briefly in why our ocean is at the heart of our very existence, and the planet’s?
It's the biggest, largest ecosystem on Earth. By a huge margin. Yet it's the one that's most out of sight, out of mind. So that's the challenge. What's happening in the ocean, most people don't see it. What's happening out on the ocean, most people don't see. We just think it's this endless bounty of food. But it's so much more than that. Every other breath we take comes from the ocean. It's the life force of the planet. It's the lungs of the earth. It's what's keeping everything together and habitable. And it’s connected to everything: land, sea, cultures, economies, social justice. So the ocean is my lens, my storybook of sorts, while talking about all of these issues at the same time.
What does that storytelling look like for you, what’s its power?
It’s the great connector and communicator. And it can look like so many different things. Sometimes it's about character-driven pieces, because people connect with other people. Sometimes it's charismatic-animal focused. Sometimes it's science-focused. It just depends on what emotive points I think I can use to connect people with the ocean.
Do you have a favorite story of interacting with marine life?
Being with the pilot whales in the Canary Islands recently was incredible. I've seen pilot whales in the ocean before, but they're always moving pretty quickly. And so we got to be with a pod of like 20 or 30 pilot whales that were resting and comfortable with me in the water. They had newborns, only a few weeks old, that were so cute. So I’m witnessing this behavior of the mom keeping the calf under her, and the big males being in between us. The males then begin to give me a little space with the mom and calf. And then the mom puts the calf on my side of her body. Ultimately, we were able to come together and have moments that were a few feet from each other.
It was a top 10 moment for me, because I have experiences in the water with incredible animals a lot. But they are generally brief, visiting encounters, where I hope to get a beautiful shot to protect that animal. And that can also be invasive for them. I'm really conscious about my responsibility and morals and role in the ocean. So these encounters are special, where you’re the real witness, patient enough to let it unfold, and in some form feel accepted. These animals are very intelligent. It's pretty clear that this process of me getting close to the calf relies on the intuition and raw instincts of intelligent marine animals to scope out a situation, and then allow it to happen.
You were recently in Tonga. Is that a good case study to share a bit about what the day-to-day work entails as you travel around the globe?
Every trip has a political focus in some way. So in Tonga, we were there for what was called the Pacific Island Forum. There are 18 small island developing nations that have this forum that's been going on for half a century. They get together, the presidents, prime ministers, to talk about all kinds of issues. For me, that was a place to go and help support ocean agendas. It’s about just being on the ground, meeting with prime ministers, hoping to see them in the lobbies of the hotels, learning their agendas. There's strong collaboration there when it comes to voting against deep sea mining and forming the High Seas Treaty, things like that.
It’s so true that things happen in these tiny moments, by just putting yourself in a space.
Yeah, and some conversations don't go anywhere. Some are incredibly powerful. Of course the time in the water is amazing because I can get the assets I need when I have a narrative and direction I want to go. I'm there just filming people and culture. Women, children, people working in the streets. Understanding that when it comes time to tell a story in this region about the oceans, I want a whole cross-section of the population represented—so that everyone feels like part of the story, and everyone knows that they're the beneficiaries of a healthy ocean and a healthy climate.
OCEAN POLICY: THE HIGH SEAS TREATY AND MARINE PROTECTED AREAS
In hearing from you, and also Max Bello, your friend and fellow ocean policy expert, at the Atmos gathering, you talked about the various frameworks—laws, decrees, conventions, or treaties—to work within. It piqued my interest, not being studied in government and public policy. Did you learn by doing in all of this?
It all stems from me realizing, How can I get what I call the sharpest edge, which is, how can my stories be impactful? What is my mission and goal? Well, if my goal is conservation wins, then you have to understand how politics work, country by country. Because as much as I'd love to be like, Oh, we need to save the whales. Why aren't they creating a marine protected area in here?, it’s complicated. No one has good answers to these questions. There are so many different mechanisms for marine protection and they all look different, so you have to learn them yourself—which one is being used where and how that operation works. And once you do, you can be more effective. We don't just need more pretty pictures of wild animals. We need more of a targeted strategy around them. So that just led me to learning—my curiosity. Also, being a filmmaker, I can't conduct a great interview with someone if I don't feel like I can sit at the table with all the great ocean academics in the world.
I wanted to ask you about the High Seas, the big, lawless area that makes up 60% of the ocean. Most of our ocean remains unexplored, not even mapped. That really captivated my imagination. Can you touch on the High Seas Treaty?
So there's no mechanism for which to protect or regulate the High Seas at the moment. The High Seas Treaty—it’s also called the BBNJ Treaty [biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction]—aims to do for the High Seas what we did for Antarctica. Anything that now happens in Antarctica has to be voted on unanimously by the members of the Antarctic Treaty.
While many countries have come on to the High Seas Treaty, there’s still a process of ratification that needs to happen, where these countries create a law within their own land that holds accountable their signature on the treaty. Once implemented [at least 60 UN member states are needed to ratify], those countries can come together to form a framework: How do we govern fishing? How do we govern protections? How do we govern mining? This process needs to happen fast, because we need to start protecting the High Seas now.
You’ve said that you feel any deep sea mining is the last straw, game over.
Yes, I feel like that. That's such a delicate ecosystem that cannot be rebuilt in our lifetime, and we just know so little about it. We can't just go and destroy one of the last ecosystems on earth that's untouched and unexplored before we learn about it.
With the bespoke nature of building a marine protected area, can you share a story of a win?
A great example of that is creating interconnected marine protected areas, binational ones that share borders. We worked on this program that connects what's called the Eastern Tropical Swimway. So these are now marine protected areas that connect the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador to the Cocos Islands of Costa Rica, down to Colombia and even Panama. And the idea is that science showed us that these huge schools of hammerheads and other pelagic fish were just using the Galapagos—all these big islands—as stopping points of a greater migratory network. What was the point of protecting the Galapagos if you're not going to protect the other places? The fish don't know boundaries.
So although they had created a marine protected area around the Galapagos, they were still trying to figure out why their biodiversity was decreasing. Well it's because the fish are swimming out of that boundary and being fished. Working with those countries to create the first real interconnected marine protected sanctuary in the world was a big win, and also opens a roadmap to success when we start looking at other countries and other strategic international collaborations around conservation.
And once a marine protected area is created, essentially the strategy is just leave it alone, right? Nature is great at repairing itself when we stop meddling, yes?
Definitely. The ocean's incredibly resilient. It heals itself very quickly. It can repopulate itself. That's the thing that’s so nice—it’s one ocean. We are still studying the value of the ocean as it pertains to offsetting climate change; but it’s frustrating because we know enough to know that if you draw big lines around things and leave them alone, they’d benefit. There are scientific roadmaps that could tell us exactly what ecosystems to preserve, those that will boost biodiversity. Fish are looking for safe havens, evolutionarily. So if you leave an area alone, things will go there to be safe, and those things will populate and thrive and spill out into other ecosystems. It's hard because people look at the ocean as a commodity, a resource that's endless. People have a hard time leaving it alone. But it is as simple as that.
We are good at overcomplicating everything and not seeing what is right in front of our face. But in the end, the earth will be here long after us.
Yeah, it’s true. It's not lost on me that we're also on a big space rock hurling towards a fireball, thousands of miles per hour, and that the earth will ultimately be on that path and reinvent itself. It's just that it's a special time that we as conscious species are evolved enough to be self-discovering and exploring the idea of whatever our creator is. And it would be nice to be able to do that for longer, to live on a sustainable planet. Sure, I know I'm gonna die. I just don't want to spend the next 30 years living in a house that's uncomfortable, doesn't have regulation. I would like there to be food. The simple things that we need are being taken away from us because of how we're treating the planet.
ON TRAVELING TO THE OCEAN FLOOR AND BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME
One of the first things I asked you when I met you is if you’ve traveled to the ocean floor. Can you share more about your experiences there?
We’re so lucky that we live in an age where there are these small submersible submarines that can go down 3,000 feet with giant glass windows that you can see out. I spent a lot of time in them. And one particular expedition was studying these deep sea sharks called sixgill sharks. So we'd go down 1,000 meters in the middle of the night for these eight- to ten-hour sub missions to the sea floor. I think what was so interesting about that experience is that you would assume that because you're going down into the dark in a submarine that's the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, that it would be claustrophobic and scary. And it wasn't for me. It was this more expansive view of our place on earth in this weird way. Everything you can imagine about the deep sea, at least as a kid, for me, was all unfolding in front of me through this big glass bubble, with creatures like deep-sea anglerfish and jellyfish and deep-sea squid.
I had this feeling of sort of returning to the womb, of going to a place that was sacred and held. And at least my belief is that life came from the deep ocean, where we evolved from. So to return to that space felt incredibly peaceful and powerful. You spend 10 hours being at the bottom of the ocean. All night long you're the only person down there. There are more people on the International Space Station at any given time than would be down where we were. After days and days of it, it becomes really comfortable and it’s the surface that becomes the scary part. And then your phone being right there, all the problems of the world resurfacing. Being able to shut it off and go to the deep at night was really transforming. And I did have this experience—I think it's pretty common—where you realize, man, if this thing just imploded right here, right now, this would be a pretty great place to die.
That’s awesome, thanks for sharing. As a little kid, I recall that my existential imaginings while lying in bed all surrounded wanting to see the ocean floor.
Yeah, it's a lot to process, going to the bottom of the ocean and being down there for that long, especially if you’re a big heavy thinker like me.
Absolutely. You’re an artist. With the fact that you must feel so connected through your mission-based work and community, I was wondering what connects you to yourself, or what grounds you.
Music. Listening to music. Playing, writing, recording. Being around people who express themselves that way. Climbing. Exploring the Front Range of Colorado. Developing climbing areas. Seeing things I’ve never seen before. And watching my kids grow and become little troublemakers.
Love it. I checked out your EP, it’s nice stuff.
I think the reason the music is important to me is because I live my life behind the lens, and part of my job there is to let the story come through me, but not from me. I don’t necessarily have a voice when it comes to the films I make; I try to not be in that role. So music is a great way for me to sit down and process my own thoughts and emotions and deliver them in a way that's pretty universal and a little more poetic.
I imagine that would be interesting to channel, allowing yourself to see what opens up into the space.
Yeah when it’s channeled, it’s the greatest.
What are you most proud of?
I'm proud of my family. My work-life balance. I'm proud of the stories I've told and all the connections I've made. I'm proud of choosing this road, this journey. Of clawing my way long enough for it to be a career that I think is somewhat sustainable.
You are probably living what most people imagine in their wildest dreams. What's your wildest dream?
My wildest dream is to see right at this point, this change, when this ship is going to steer the other way. When we're going to turn the ship. That's my dream, to see that happen, because I'm working on it from all angles—and all the policy and science and mechanisms I thought to be the true steers of change are failing. So I'm curious about what is the next thing that's going to cut through to people. While I have some time left, that’s what I’m aiming to see.