Deep trouble

Deep trouble

Life talks with Nat Sumanatemeya, an underwater photographer whose pictures help us see what's happening to our oceans

SOCIAL & LIFESTYLE

He got up close with a 13m whale shark near the Galapagos and swam with a curious hunchback whale in Tonga. "She was larger than a bus," he said, "the largest animal I've ever seen." At Burma Banks in the Indian Ocean, he drifted with sharks and at Similan Islands he realised that the coral reefs in the Thai seas were among the most beautiful in the world.

Nat Sumanatemeya's photo of a whale shark, part of the "Beyond The Air We Breathe" exhibition beginning this Thursday. Photos courtesy of Nat Sumanatemeya

But Nat Sumanatemeya, a seasoned underwater photographer for nearly 30 years, has also seen something else, something less beautiful, such as how the ocean has been abused, how the amount of rubbish has increased, and how a troubling combination of tourism, climate change, plastic consumption and the fishing industry has taken its toll on nature.

Starting Thursday, Nat will be one of the photographers featured in a major photographic exhibition, "Beyond The Air We Breathe: Addressing Climate Change", curated by the Lucie Foundation and hosted by the Royal Photographic Society of Thailand. The show, which will take place at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, brings together an impressive list of 80 photographers, including heavyweights such as James Natchwey, Steve McCurry, Sebastian Copeland, Tom Jacobi and more. Nat is the sole Thai represented in the exhibition.

"I once dived at Aldabra, an uninhabited atoll near the Seychelles, and there was trash down there," said Nat, who began his career taking nature photography for the famed Or Sor Tor magazine in the early 1990s. "Even somewhere further down from the Maldives, where there wasn't supposed to be plastic bags and trash, there it was.

Nat Sumanatemeya.

"To be fair, I believe not many people still intentionally throw trash into the sea, and there are some dive sites where I've seen definitely less rubbish than before," Nat added. "But remember that the first plastic bag made 50 years ago is still with us, somewhere, maybe in the sea."

As the title suggests, the exhibition "Beyond The Air We Breathe" wishes to highlight the impact of climate change through nature photography by these professionals (see box). An earlier version of the show was presented during COP21, as the United Nations Climate Change Conference is often known, and the photos of extreme weather, storm-tossed houses, melting glaciers and polluted villages became proof of the damage sustained by the planet throughout the 21st century.

Recently, Thailand has had a string of environmental scandals, all happening at sea. Last week a green turtle died on a beach in Chanthaburi, with plastic shreds and rubber bands found in its stomach. Earlier this month a pilot whale was found struggling near a Songkhla beach. It soon died, and what made news around the world, from National Geographic to the Daily Mail, was that 80 plastic bags weighing 8kg were found in the animal's belly.

Most vividly was a case happening last month when a pregnant whale shark was caught by a trawler and released back to sea only when a group of divers spotted the boat and pressured the crew. The video of the incident showing the whale shark being lifted by a crane on the trawler went viral, causing uproar, and the animal reportedly died soon after it was put back into the water.

One of Nat's photos shows a tiny fish in a plastic bag.

And there were many more cases that didn't become public, Nat said. He cited statistics from the Marine and Coastal Resources Research and Development Institute that each year in Thailand, over 300 marine animals -- mostly whales and dolphins -- were found dead from ingesting plastic bags and rubbish.

As an underwater photographer with hundreds of dives in his log, Nat has been an eyewitness to the state of abundance and the uncertain future of the ocean over the years -- at home and abroad, though in fact they're all the same ocean of planet Earth. In the early 1990s, he learned the craft from Thailand pioneers in marine photography, such as Apinan Buahapakdee and Vinit Rangpheung, and Nat was lucky enough to be able to take pictures of Thailand's renowned dive sites when they were still at their most splendid, at Similan Islands, Surin Islands, Tachai Island and the famed Richelieu Rock, home of iridescent corals and sea creatures.

A combination of factors, controllable and not, has undermined the state of Thailand's marine environment over the past 20 years, Nat believes. "The tsunami of 2004 damaged over half of shallow water corals we had in the country," he said. "After the tsunami, we had this massive coral bleaching. Though bleaching is a recurring phenomenon that in the past happened every 10 years or 20 years, it has become more frequent due to rising sea temperature."

Most of these are globalised factors beyond all control. But the problem seems pointed due to something else more internal: in the past 10 years, Thai marine parks -- actually all natural parks, land or sea -- have groaned under the increasing weight of mass tourism and the unstoppable trend continues upward (35 million foreign visitors arrived last year, and the first four months of 2018 have already seen 13 million). Meanwhile, the fishing industry has contributed to environmental concerns, such as with the use of trawlers, dynamite and even the proliferation of coastal shrimp farming that releases waste into the ocean. The big flood of 2011 dumped tonnes of waste into the Gulf of Thailand as well.

A photo by Sebastian Copeland. Photo © Sebastian Copeland

Nat remembers how it was once a feat just to get to Similan Islands, since there were just a few boats for divers and tourists leaving from Phangnga. "Earlier this year when I went, I was shocked. There were literally a hundred boats and thousands of tourists," he said.

"One of the turning points in that area was the boom of Khao Lak [a section of coastline down from Phangnga] in the late 1990s, which brought in a large number of tourists. Now the authorities try to contain the impact by closing down some natural parks. But the problem, obviously, is we still have the same number of tourists coming into the country, and if they can't go to this island because it's closed, they can go to another island instead. On and on like this. Do we have to keep closing more parks or islands?"

While all this worrying news puts Thailand on the spot and highlights the delicate balance between the need for tourists' spending and environmental conservation, the fate of the world is something that requires both local commitment and global co-operation. The dramatic death of the pilot whale with plastic bags in its stomach, for instance, may put Thailand in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, but Nat believes that what happened is symptomatic of the entire planet.

"The whale died in Thailand and we felt bad about it," he said. "But all plastic bags dumped into the ocean drift around the world and the whale must have swum through many seas. I think the blame must be shared by everyone.

"Having a photo exhibition on climate change will let people see for themselves the state of the world. But it takes more than that. People will love and care about the environment only when they know what it is, when they're connected with it in an intimate way, when they leave the city and go camping or watching the stars and realise, hopefully, that those are the real things that matter. That we're so small compared to everything else."

WORDS, PICTURES OF A WORLD WORTH SAVING

"Beyond The Air We Breathe: Addressing Climate Change" is a collaboration between The Royal Photographic Society of Thailand, Lucie Foundation and Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. Photographs by 80 world-renowned photographers, including James Natchwey, Steve McCurry, Sebastian Copeland, Tom Jacobi, as well as Nat Sumanatemeya from Thailand, will be shown from June 28 to Sept 2 the BACC's main exhibition hall on the 9th floor. Admission is free.

On June 28, Sebastian Copeland will give a talk at the venue. Copeland is an award-winning photographer, polar explorer, author, lecturer, and environmental activist. He has led numerous expeditions in the polar regions to photograph and film endangered environments.

Other photographers on the list are world-renowned figures. Steve McCurry is known, among many other endeavours, for taking the fabled "Afghan Girl" picture for National Geographic. Tom Jacobi is known for his mystical landscape photography that renders the reality of the world in a mist of spiritualism. Jim Natchwey, a frequent traveller to Bangkok, is one of the best-known photojournalists who has captured war-ravaged countries and other cruel realities around the world.

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