By Craig Foster
Mr. Foster’s film, “My Octopus Teacher,” won the Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2021. He wrote from Simon’s Town, South Africa.
I was gifted with a new way of seeing the day I got mugged underwater. I had been filming creatures living in the Great African Sea Forest off the coast of South Africa about a year ago when my camera was grabbed straight out of my hands by a young octopus thief. Wrapping her arms around her bounty, she zoomed backward across the ocean floor.
This was not the first time I’d found myself at the mercy of an eight-armed robber. A couple years earlier, another curious octopus stole the wedding ring off my wife’s finger, never to be recovered. Octopuses love novel shiny things. Peering into their dens, I’ve found earrings, bracelets, spark plugs, sunglasses and a toy car with a revolving cylinder that the octopus spun round and round with its suckers.
As I wondered how to get my camera back without alarming my young friend, something surprising happened. She turned the camera around and began to film my diving partner and me.
The intriguing images she captured — videos of her own arms draped over the camera lens with our bodies in the background — had a profound effect on me. After many years filming octopuses and hundreds of other animals that call the Sea Forest home, for the first time I was seeing the world — and myself — from her perspective.
We must have looked strange to her in our masks and with our underwater flashlights. But in that moment I remembered that despite all our technology, we are not so different from our animal kin. Every breath of air, every drop of water, every bite of food comes from the living planet we share.
Monday is Earth Day, and I am tempted to ask myself how humanity can save our wild planet and undo the devastation we have unleashed upon the natural world. Where I live, in the Cape of Good Hope, I am privileged to be surrounded by nature, but we are grappling with pollution and dwindling numbers of shellfish, fish, raptors and insect species. Worldwide, we are at a tipping point with an estimated 69 percent decline in wildlife populations. (continued)
Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, died in 1818 of “milk fever”, the cause of which was not known by white “settlers” until 1818, when Anna Pierce learned it from a Shawnee Indian woman, and then verified it by experimenting. Even then, since Pierce was a mere female, her claim was not credited until 1906, when tremetol was isolated from the white snakeroot plant and proved to cause the illness in cows, deer, goats, and horses, and was transmitted to humans by eating the meat or milk of infected animals.
As we have “conquered” the natural world we have lost or destroyed much of the knowledge and collective wisdom about living with nature that was accumulated over thousands of years by the actual human settlers, like the Shawnee woman who told Anna PIerce about milk sickness. Any now to save ourselves we have to actually put down our cell phones and pay attention, although since we never noticed what is now gone, we are trying to catch ghosts. Hey, I have an idea for a reality show…
I mispoke in my original comment. Anna Pierce’s claim about white snakeroot was made in 1828, not 1818. I apologize for the typo
Buck Horton