Beyond clickbait and commerce

Lyn McGaurr
be shipped through the channels of the Great Bear Rainforest en
route to markets in Asia, with the attendant risk of environmentally
devastating spills. Despite the efforts of ENGO Pacific Wild to
prevent the project proceeding, in 2010 Enbridge announced
it would submit formal plans for approval. In a 2013 slide-show
presentation for National Geographic, photographer Paul Nicklen
recalled that he met First Nations spirit bear guide Marven Robinson
when he (Nicklen) was visiting the Great Bear Rainforest prior to
the RAVE and Robinson asked him to help the Gitga’at people of
Hartley Bay prevent the pipeline. Pacific Wild director McAllister
said in our interview that he also asked Nicklen for advice on
preventing the pipeline (McAllister, Ian, personal communication,
17 June 2015). These encounters led to two outcomes: Nicklen
secured the backing of National Geographic to do a story on spirit
bears; and at Nicklen’s suggestion McAllister flew to the 9th World
Wilderness Congress in Merida, Mexico, which iLCP founder and
inaugural president Cristina Mittermeier was attending, and gave
a presentation about his concerns (ibid), leading to an agreement
between Pacific Wild and iLCP to collaborate on a Great Bear
Rainforest RAVE.
The United States based iLCP was established by Mittermeier
in 2005. In 2015 the organisation was managed by Alexandra
Garcia and frames itself on its website (iLCP 2015a) as creating
opportunities for photography that gives the kind of context to
environmental debates that Hansen and Machin (2008) consider
essential to establishing links between specific issues and concrete
processes of capitalism. The organisation also promotes ethical
photography (Garcia, Alexandra, personal communication, 26
May 2015). Its code of practice (iLCP 2015d) includes responsible
behaviour in the field and honesty in captioning practices. If images
by iLCP Fellows are manipulated, the manipulation must be nondeceptive
or ‘fully disclosed to the end user’ (iLCP 2015d). The
organisation’s stated principles are integrity (producing work that
is ‘authentic, accurate and honest’), professionalism and respect
for human and wild subjects (iLCP 2015d). It also seeks to ‘educate
the community as a whole about the value of imagery’ (Garcia,
Alexandra, personal communication, 26 May 2015):
…if non-profit organisations want to be able to get consistent
access to high quality imagery without having to go and search
the internet and go through ten million images before they find
a really good one that they can use that has the proper rights,
that is legitimate, that’s not stolen, that they can actually use and
print, photographers have to be able to make a living.
In September 2010, nine iLCP photographers, including Mittermeier
and McAllister, and several filmmakers, joined Nicklen – then also
an iLCP Fellow – in the Great Bear Rainforest. The photographers
24 Copyright 2016-2/3. Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. All rights reserved. Vol 13, No 2/3 2016