There are few occasions that find astronauts and fashion editors in the same room, seating Captain Paul Watson and Sylvia Earle alongside Camille Bidault-Waddington, Aymeline Valade and even Florian Schneider – but Parley for the Oceans is a catalyst for unconventional unions. An organisation founded by creative concept developer Cyrill Gutsch in 2012, designed to disrupt the current system of environmental advocacy by uniting conservationists with creative forces, Parley’s mission is to ignite conversations between traditionally remote disciplines. As Jefferson Hack explained, “designers and the creative communities within industry have the greatest capacity to innovate solutions; they can adopt new practices, implement them from within and literally hack the system. These are solutions outside of scientific dogma; creative approaches that don’t rely on the conventional tropes of ethical consumerism or on governmental action but offer new routes, new modes of production for brands, the invention of revolutionary materials.”
Dedicated to developing radical new strategies to combat the desperate situation that our oceans are in (we are about to reach the point of no return; our over-fishing and polluting has now reached a level so unsustainable that it might be irreparable), Parley is the organisation behind mammoth corporate collaborations like G-Star’s RAW for the Oceans, fronted by Pharrell Williams, and an alliance with adidas that saw trainers constructed out of repurposed illegal fishing nets (and has since prompted a revolution in the sustainability of performancewear). During the COP21 talks in Paris this year, the organisation hosted a series of events to provoke trans-disciplinary solution-based conversations around eco conservation – and here we highlight some of the most seminal moments from the luminaries of the creative and conservation industries alike…
Nicolas Hulot
If we continue exploiting the oceans in the same manner that we currently are, within the next 100 years we can expect flooding of lowlands throughout countries including Vietnam, India, Thailand, The Philippines, Indonesia and Egypt. The reality of climate crisis is that it disproportionately affects marginalised communities: they are the ones who will be forced to seek refuge, rather than affording large-scale rebuilding strategies, when their homelands flood. They are the ones whose crop yields fall and plunge them deeper into poverty – and their undue, man-made suffering creates a breeding ground for animosity, fuelling international conflicts. Last year, in light of these facts, the UN designated climate change a threat to human security – but as Nicolas Hulot explained at Parley, today “We are invited to write a new chapter for humanity.” The legendary force for environmental sustainability located the conservation movement within the broader realities of global inequality and rang with a particularly emotive truth in the current global political climate.
"Only beauty will save the world" - Nicolas Hulot
“Paris' COP21 is not a only a conference for the environment, but it is also a conference for peace – because climate crisis, and ocean crisis, add inequality to inequality, poverty to poverty, misery to misery. It is the ultimate injustice, because it is always the poor people who are the first to suffer. And when you add to their inegalité, and when you humiliate people, you explain what happens in war. We are at a very specific time in our civilisation: we can still decide, we can still save the oceans, we can still save humanity. But the window is very short; it’s not tomorrow, it’s now. Our main problem is cultural, which is why we need cultural people – artists, people who can design the world of tomorrow – to bring it back to beauty, because only beauty will save the world.”
Captain Paul Watson
Environmental activist Captain Paul Watson is a force to be reckoned with. One of the original founders of Greenpeace – he parted ways with the group in 1978 because, as The New York Times states, "he wanted it to be more aggressive" and the group now terms him, and his organisation Sea Shepherd, as violent extremists – his direct-action, radical approach to conservation (he even flies a skull-and-crossbones flag on his ship) has resulted in an abundance of detention sentences and deportations. However, his persistent dedication to holding international bodies accountable for oceanic lawlessness and illegal whaling has established him as a hero both within conservationist circles and beyond. "He’s one of the gutsiest guys on the planet,” Martin Sheen once told the New Yorker, and with support from high-profile figures including Mick Jagger, Pamela Anderson, Uma Therman and Sean Penn, he has become a pop-culture icon as well as an environmental one.
"Sea Shepherd are the ladies of the night of the conservation movement" - Captain Paul Watson
"I like to say that Sea Shepherd are the ladies of the night of the conservation movement; people agree with us but they don't actually want to be seen with us because we're too controversial. But you have to be controversial; you have to take action; you have to stand up and say, 'you can't continue to do this'. Right now, the Japanese whaling fleet is heading down to the southern ocean, in defiance of the International Court of Justice, in defiance of the International Whaling Commission, in contempt of the Australian Court. If this was Uruguay or Nigeria, they would be stopped, but because it’s Japan it's just going ahead – and so we have to go after them and our vessel left yesterday to do just that. As a result, we're called pirates and eco-terrorists. I keep telling people that I'm not an eco-terrorist – I've never worked for Monsanto – but when they began to call us pirates I say, 'well you know what? You want us to be pirates, we'll be pirates. Because back in the day, pirates got things done.'"
Vivienne Westwood
Renowned for her rebellious approach to politics, Dame Vivienne Westwood has spent the past decade chanelling her punk spirit into activism – and, since meeting Captain Paul Watson several years ago (brilliantly, they were introduced by fellow environmentalist Pamela Anderson), she has become a vocal advocate for oceanic revolution. During COP21, a time when politicians are supposedly uniting in Paris to discuss what they need to do to avoid the destruction of humanity, the doyenne of British fashion proclaimed, "I think that the politicians are here just as a token, just because the public wants them to come. It is totally going to be worthless; actually, they needn't have bothered." Instead of maintaining blind dependence on a political sphere that has, thus far, exhibited a willful indifference to provoking real environmental change, what Westwood promotes is a vocal form of activism that puts pressure on the people supposed to represent us all; a type of activism with protest at its core.
"Politicians are our enemies" - Vivienne Westwood
"Politicians are our enemies. We've got to keep on fighting battles against them, because it’s the only way to wear them down. Politicians are weak, and they're desperate – but nevertheless, if they carry on in the position they're in, we’ll die. We've got to do something about them.”
Leland Melvin
In 1990, when Voyager 1 took an image of the earth from six billion kilometers away, it was a moment that changed the world. Of the 640,000 pixels that composed the iconic image, the Earth took up less than one; it was a "pale blue dot," a literal symbol of the perspective that humanity needed to reframe its environmental priorities. Seeing the planet as a minute component within an inconceivably vast universe refigures things a little – as Carl Sagan famously said, that dot was "The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." Astronaut Leland Melvin, a man who has completed two separate space missions, explained the moment that he realised the reality of two thirds of our planet being blue...
"Let's help our oceans live long and prosper" - Leland Melvin
"It was during one of my space missions that I had this moment of cognitive shift. We were going at 17,500 miles per hour, orbiting the planet every 90 minutes, seeing a sunrise and a sunset every 45 minutes and I'm looking out the window and seeing that two thirds of our planet is ocean. My mind shifted to think, 'what am I going to do to help change things when I get back?' because these people are trying to help explore trying to advance our civilisation but we have so many things on the planet that are wrong... As Spock said, 'live long and prosper' – so let's help our oceans live long and prosper."
Sylvia Earle
"At times, when I've asked women if they want to be astronauts, I've had them tell me no, because it's 'the man's space programme'" explained Leland Melvin. "The language we use is so important to ensuring that everyone has a seat at the table – and Sylvia, you have changed so many things by showing young ladies that they could do or be anything they put their mind to, as well as by helping us save the oceans." Earle is a legendary oceanographer (over the course of her career, she has logged over 7,000 hours of underwater experience) – and she has not only had an inimitably transformative impact on humanity's understanding of our planet, but has equally challenged the gender stereotypes omnipresent within the sciences ever since she first plunged into the oceans in 1953. Regularly referred to as "Her Deepness", she has deservedly been awarded almost every conceivable accolade for her work – from being termed a “Living Legend” by America’s Library of Congress to being the first person awarded Time Magazine's "Hero for the Planet” title – and her speech at Parley was a humbling moment, illuminating not only the crisis that we are in but equally where we can go from here...
"Knowledge is the key. Because once you know, there's a chance you might care" - Sylvia Earle
"We’re armed with insight that we didn't have half a century ago; back then, we thought the world, and certainly thought the ocean, was too big to fail. That we could always breathe the air, there would always be fish in the sea. We’re currently on the edge of the greatest era of exploration this planet has ever known. Only about 5% of the ocean has been seen – let alone explored below 100 metres or so, where divers can conveniently go. But at the same time as we're learning more about the ocean, we're losing even more... So we need to do what we're doing right here and parley, share our views with eachother and know that knowledge is the key. Because once you know, there's a chance you might care – and never before have we been blessed with more knowledge."
